Who do you want to be? I’m pretty happy with who I am, all things considered. I mean, the joints are getting a little too creaky to be right where I want to be. I get earaches a lot. Earaches? When the hell did that start. I seem to recall something about an earache the last time when I was 10 years old, in Washington, watching a Caps game. During a raucous pre-game pillowfight in the hotel, I was blindsided viciously by one of the other running-men, and fell ear-first into the corner of the nightstand. Screaming children, dancing lights before my eyes, and an eardrum gushing blood onto the bed, from what I can remember. But there’s a groove for you; I didn’t even need alcohol back then to pull the ol’, “Hey y’all, watch this!” It just happens naturally to children, without the need for finely-aged and/or -brewed refreshments, like, say, your run-of-the-mill blog meet, with bullwhips and such.

But somehow the earache lain in wait for two-and-a-half decades, ready to pounce. I’ve been sick for about 3 weeks now, which really isn’t like me. Normally, I’ve got an iron constitution, seeing as over the years I’ve built up an environment of toxins in my body that’s inhospitable to your average germ varmint. To all life, really. The soupy buildup of nicotine, alcohol, and stress toxins in my blood would put the post-Katrina sludge in New Orleans to shame, just wait until the Rube-Tsunami hits, then let’s see Curious George wriggle out of the media storm that follows. “Rube: What Went Wrong?”

Yeah, well, enough about that shit. On with the show. I’m not getting any younger, despite the wash of childhood diseases and injuries that may yet wait around the corner on my walk home tonight.