You know what’s really pissing me off these days?

Aging.

Aging is pissing me off. Aging and Victoria’s Secret. And Carl’s Junior. A little bit the NFL, too. But mostly aging. And I have to tell you, I have been very cool about aging to this point. I’ve accepted it gracefully all along, without the least complaint. Or at least mostly without the least complaint.

My hair fell out years ago, long before I was done using it. Fine. I’m a writer. A creative guy. A science fiction writer, no less, so I read, like, science and stuff. So I say it’s evolution. My hair fell out because I am evolved—more evolved, really. Like more evolved than you. I mean, monkeys and apes are hairy. The more they evolved over time, the less hairy they became. And now, here’s me, bald as hell. How much hair do you have?

See, I win. And yet our culture doesn’t recognize it.

If you think about it, when it comes to men in particular, our society idolizes primitives. Just look at guys like Tom Selleck and Ted Danson. Rich? Sure. Attractive? Fine. But both with “perfect hair.” Hah. Perfect and primitive. Everyone thinks those guys are so cool. I laugh at them. They are probably both sitting in their mansions somewhere eating bananas and throwing feces at whatever super models they are fornicating with these days. So yeah, I’m good. Bald is fine.

I also embraced waking up and peeing in the middle of the night when that little piece of personal joy entered my reality. Did you see me complain or whine about getting old when that began? No. You did not. Because I did not. I just get up and pee. Yes, it’s cold climbing out from beneath the blankets. Yes, the toilet seat is made of ice. And, yes, I sit down to pee. It’s the middle of the night, FFS. But before you laugh, I would like to point out that researchers at MIT conducted a very expensive study in 1991 in which they proved that lights are 7,246 times brighter at 3:00 a.m. than they are 11:00 p.m. Or at least I think they did. So, yes, I sit down while peeing in the middle of the night, as I have neither a wish to pee on the floor nor one to have my eyelids arc welded to my irises.

Speaking of which, I also did not complain about the fact that I have been reduced to wearing “progressive” lenses for my aging eyesight—progressive being a euphemism for bifocals, which everyone knows only happens to old people.

Beyond that, I also did not complain a few years back when my rectum gave birth to a knobular entity that persisted for nearly an entire year, bled like a ruptured packet of fast food ketchup, and, at times, itched like someone had kicked an anthill in my butt.

But no, I was fine with all that. I said nothing. A quick trip to the doctor to make sure I’m not dying, and, yeah, I’m good. A roid. Ha, hah, it’s so funny to age and stuff. Hah hah. A hemorrhoid, how trite. I laughed because I’m cool and worldly and above such things. I’m ageing gracefully, as they say. Which might seem ironic, because when people think of graceful stuff, they think of cats or ballerinas or something. But nothing really says grace like the quiet acceptance of onset blindness, pissing in the dark, and itchy, grape-sized sphincter nuggets crawling with ants.

Oh yeah.

So anyway, speaking of ballerinas—who are basically hot chicks that leap around like gazelles and do so not just because gazelles are young and graceful and enjoy having 5% body fat, but also because they are very happy that, as gazelles, they never need progressive lenses or Preparation-H—it brings up the whole concept of hot chicks in general. This blog entry was inspired by the goddamn Victoria’s Secret commercial I saw the other day. It came on, and, well, I just ended up wondering what the heck is happening to the world? What is happening to the universe? To everything? It’s all just going crazy for some reason.

I used to peek into a Victoria’s Secret catalogue and drool. I remember seeing those provocative publications when I was in my teens and, if I’m being honest, it might as well have been porn. Those women were freaking hot. Like, insanely hot. They were pure fantasy come to life: the incarnation of idealized feminine sexuality.

So, time passed. Life moves you along its phases and stages. As I got older, I didn’t get worked up about that kind of thing anymore. Hot chicks on stage? Who gives a crap. I’d found myself a beautiful wife. Had kids. I got mature and stuff. So, Victoria’s Secret catalogues, Sports Illustrated swimsuit editions, even the Raiderette’s calendars … fine, nice, but no big deal. A catalogue would show up somewhere here and there across a decade or two, and I’d flip through it. The chicks were still hot—I’m not trying to say they weren’t. Page after page of super hot chicks in bras and panties will always be an awesome idea. In recent years, they came out with Victoria’s Secret commercials on television. They even made a whole show out of it: a bunch of hot chicks in angel wings and stuff. Which was great the first time I got to see more than 37.9 seconds of one before my wife entered the room, at which point the cultural man-hate guilt-reflex kicks in and I have to say something like, “Good lord, what kind of drivel is this? I can’t believe how insipid television has gotten these days.”

If there is any benefit to be had from the time, energy and expense required to get a master’s degree in English, it is the ability to think of a word like “insipid” in a moment like that.

Anyway, all of that is fine or boring or something. But it’s not like I need to watch TV and ogle a bunch of bimbos clunking around in high heels and really lame, fake angel wings while wearing way too much glitter and, if we’re being honest, way too much “lingerie” anyway. It’s like, I mean, pretending to make clothes for naked chicks without actually clothing them is probably hard to do, so I give the fashion designers credit for making an industry out of that, but, well … just … whatever. That’s not my point. For many years in recent memory, that was fine. “Oh look, next down the runway is Samantha Sunnybuns wearing a sparkly ensemble made of cellophane and three slices of pepperoni.” Great. We’re objectifying her, but I can’t see her nipples or her genitalia. Uh, okay. So America can’t commit to anything. But it’s fine. Pointless, but fine.

But now—last night if we are being totally accurate—I saw a Victoria’s Secret commercial on TV for the first time in a long time, and, well, it was just, completely different in these very huge and disturbing ways.

Lithe bodies, sublime flat tummies, long legs … probably too thin and maybe she could use a sandwich or something—what are her parents thinking letting her get that thin, by the way?—but anyway, lots of flesh nicely revealed. The lights glinted splendidly off of it all. Everything seemed fine. But then, there were three off them coming down the catwalk toward the camera. Three angels with wings and sparkly boobs. Everyone loves angels, and everyone loves sparkly boobs, but imagine: sparkly angel boobs! Somewhere deep in my brain, depravity was loosening its pants. But the camera zooms in even closer. Oh yeah. Bring it, baby. They’re pretty too. You can tell as they draw nearer the cameras. Long, sumptuous eyelashes, mascara perfectly thick and black, super seductive. Brightly painted lips. They’ll have perfect faces too, I just know it. Faces to match the perfect model body.

The cameras close in, right on them now. High cheek bones. Two of them, the first two angels, then one, the shot getting tighter and tighter on her … And then I’m like, WTF?

She was like 14 or something.  Maybe less. She might have been a fetus. It’s hard to say.  Just way too young. They all were.

I turn to my wife.

“WTF?” I say. “They are children!”

She’s like, “No, they’re not. They’re all 18 or 20 at least.”

I’m all, “No. Look at them. They are practically infants. Look at their faces! How can I imagine depraved and debauched things to do to them if they are going to be infants?” She rolled her eyes, but, no, seriously, look for yourself:

http://youtu.be/eZlWitT-n4U

Now listen, I’m normally the first person to make the principled “Hey, if she’s legal, she’s legal” argument. I love that argument. Yes, some call it shallow and perverted, but I’m just saying: it’s a solid argument. Everyone knows young is good in terms of firmness and nice skin and stuff. So, don’t get all high and mighty on me. I’m a guy, and I won’t apologize for my highly evolved appreciation of that, no matter how much this arrogant, hypocritical, historically blind and humanistically out-of-touch society we live in tries insists that I should hate myself and the biological imperatives that come with my gender and my genes. But that said, I mean, there’s legal on paper, and then there is, like: Can you please also LOOK legal? That’s my point.

They used to be able to do it, and you will notice that in THIS video, only the second one looks like a child, the rest are actual full grown women, rendering them perfectly legitimate—or at least completely guilt-free on my part—targets of willing objectification:

So, clearly, in the second video, it’s fine. Lust is both justified and entirely called for. But in the first one, well, those sparkly sex angels may have “technically” been 18 or 20 based on their birth certificates, but they did not look it. That’s my point. At least, not to my old ass eyes. And that’s seriously jacked up. I paid extra money to get these goddamn old-man “progressive” lenses so that I could SEE well. But, this is not seeing well. This is seeing terribly. That’s the real problem here.  It’s some kind of indictment of my age. A willful act on the part of the television networks and hot chicks to make me feel old. It’s a conspiracy, I say.

According to my doctor—who turns out to be part of the cabal—I’m going to keep getting older, too. First off, that is a very negative attitude for a doctor to have, much less say out loud. Secondly, he seems to be suggesting that aging will now continue from hence forth no matter what.

I want to disbelieve it, to assume he got his medical degree in some third world country or from one of those online universities, but I am seeing more and more evidence than just ants in my pants. Which, by the way, is funny, sad,  and maybe ironic in that we think when we are kids that “ants in your pants” is just so hilarious in this abstract sort of way.  We have no clue that this is an idea born of a pending reality for us all. Like, “Hah hah, insects in your butt, hah hah, so funny” but, um, yeah, no, you are actually going to have that happen for the most part. Maybe not the actual bugs, but, well, yeah, close enough.

But, whatever. It was getting worse. There was more. I noticed the same baby-face effect on a Carl’s Junior commercial the other day. Further evidence that my doctor was right and that the television industry is working against me in insidious ways, recruiting hot chicks to undermine me.

There’s this one Carl’s Junior commercial with an airline stewardess eating a “mile high” burger or something of that sort. It was just like the Victoria’s Secret thing. First time it came on, I’m watching along, thinking, “Oh, yeah, eat that sammich, baby. Mile high club for the win!” But then they finish out the commercial with a close up of her face, first zooming in on her delightful cleavage then up to … you guessed it: another goddamn 14 year old face.

Again I say, “WTF?”

I’m trying to fight it. To deny it. My wife even insists they aren’t fourteen. She says, “No, dear, they all look legal.” She doesn’t say legal, exactly (or any of the other stuff I quoted her as saying), but that’s what she means when she says, “Good God, could you stop already? You’ve commented on every commercial for the last two hours. Not everything is some big social symptom or sign of conspiracy. You’re giving me a headache.” But that’s just her long, chick way of saying that, you know, in her opinion the models in the commercial aren’t fourteen. Women never just say what they mean. Fortunately, however, if there is an upside of being an older man, it is that I have learned how to read women and interpret what they say—which is also an indicator of my higher evolution too.

And, before the chicks out there reading this find some way to make some kind of feminist argument or something against me, I would like to point out that this phenomenon of everyone looking like children is not strictly limited to chicks. I’ve been noticing that the NFL is doing it as bad as Victoria’s Secret and Carl’s Junior. Guys like Andrew Luck, Derek Carr and Andy Dalton and half of the rest of the NFL look like children as well. It truly is an obvious TV conspiracy to make me feel old. These children are now being admitted into the NFL, for crying out loud—a very dangerous game, mind you—and then they try to grow beards and pretend they are strong, fit professional athletes. They even go so far as to get super high, league-busting epic quarterback ratings and guide their teams to playoffs and stuff to help perpetrate the deception. It’s ridiculous. Everyone knows a baby-faced infant can’t lead a team to the playoffs, much less the Super Bowl. But, there they are. Luck is even trying to grow a beard. It’s just silly. I’ve seen peaches on chemo with more masculine facial fuzz.

So, thanks to stupid Victoria’s Secret and Carl’s Junior, they’ve actually ruined perversion and my self esteem. Way to go Victoria’s Secret. Way to go Carl’s Junior—and I ate so many of your hamburgers, too. I supported you as your company grew. Congratulations on finding a way to empty life of meaning.  What is a world where hot chicks are no longer hot?  What is that? That’s like a paradox, a twist in the very physics of the universe. How can something be hot and not simultaneously? If the sun ever burns but no longer gives heat, we would all die. It’s that kind of thing.

No wonder old guys play golf. There’s just nothing else. It’s like this perverse metaphor for the last decades of your life: paying money to whack a ball, just one, toward a hole that is so far out of your reach now. But you chase it anyway, buy a fake metal shaft, a phallic replacement, a symbolic attempt to replicate one’s turgid youth from which time has now alienated you, or at least will eventually. Woot!