Look down at your hand. Flex the tendons, watch them ripple under the skin. What a nice design! So silent and quick. That’s what they never get in these cyborg movies: the fact that a really good design doesn’t whirr and clank. It’s silent and quick, like bodies are. Like yours. Yours, these sinews; and that long, stretchable leg, genital toy, brave shoulders, stubborn toes, a zoo of perfect forms and all yours for the price of admission.
There’s only one little flaw: you are trapped in the body of a dying animal. In fact, you can see how far gone you are just by testing the skin of that hand of yours. Try pinching the skin on the back of your hand. Now let it go. Count the seconds it takes to smooth itself out. The longer it takes, the older your skin is.
And here’s a really cheering bit of news: your skin, the largest organ in your body, is also the organ which ages most slowly. So however depressing it may be to look at the skin of your hand wearily resuming its proper shape, you can make yourself feel even worse by remembering that things are much, much worse on the inside. Your liver, your lungs, your heart, your joints — all the things you can’t see are decaying much faster than your skin.
When you first see your skin dying, you assume there’s a quick fix: what’s that stuff, rototonin or something? You rub it on and your skin youngs up. But it’s expensive, embarrassing, and only works for a while. You forget to put it on, and the wadis of your skin deepen. Meanwhile, the last fringe of hair has vanished from the Sahel of your forehead, your eyebrows begin to look Brezhnevian, your back is hairier than a tarantula’s, and your breasts are bigger than your wife’s.
There’s been a mistake. Someone screwed up the design, with malicious intent. Can you sue Darwin? Can you negotiate an exit from this dying animal? Apparently not. What are we, mere medieval peasants, serfs? Absolutely.
It gets worse. Aging is drying; the cells get scaly, reptilian, sagging like Iguana-hide. It’s not so droll anymore. It invades your dreams: quick cuts of teeth crumbling and hair shedding like an old dog’s ass, in close-ups that scare you awake. (...)
Aging is shrinking: cells wink out and you’re literally a smaller person than you were. You’re a walking brownout. Dead muscle, never to be replaced, is squeezed through your increasingly inefficient anus. In a typical Darwinian joke, the dead cells are processed into hard, unfriendly turds which sandpaper the anus until you grow a little grape-cluster of hemorrhoids. Nature is efficient, and never smacks you once when it can whack you twice.
As biological catastrophes accumulate, more and more of your mental energy is devoted to blocking the signals broadcasting damage and decay from sites all over the body. If you listened to these signals, you’d scream and collapse. You’re a dry-land version of those salmon in the grizzly documentaries, the humped mutant fish whose bodies are dead but still swimming, covered with necrotic patches, constantly flaking away downstream.
All these pain-broadcasts have their bitter stories, most of them reminders of avoidable injuries. The knee — whose fault is that? Yours. Every time you walk more than fifty yards, that knee broadcasts the phrase “bone on bone.” The tissues that were installed at the factory have worn down like old shock absorbers that bang against the frame. Then there’s your heart, and the jaw thing, and your queasy gut. Your fault, your fault, and your fault, respectively.
But the worst torments are the ones too dumb to be tragic — the gnat buzzes of the aging body. There’s a patch of skin in your left ear that starts itching as soon as you get into bed, and grows a pale scab which you must scrape away with the nail of your little finger every week or so. The doctor doesn’t believe in it, and you sound like a whining fool when you try to explain. So you resort to the fingernail-gouging approach. Naturally, it gets infected. This is your own fault. All these trivial nightmares are (a) ridiculous, and (b) your own fault.
You’re married to a slut, a slave: a human body. And try getting a divorce from that wife, baby. When you’re married to your body, it really is “till death do you part.” Short of walking off the tenth floor or eating a 12-gauge, you and your body are as married as a couple of Mormons. That’s Earth, man: one big Utah. Monogamy, you and your body sliding into decay hand in hand. Touching, huh?
But it all started out so well! You replay it over and over (because you seem to spend a lot of hours lying down these days)…but no matter how many times you rewind, it comes out the same way. Let’s face it: you never had a chance, any more than the trilobites did. All you can do is play it back, and back, and back.
Ready? It doesn’t matter if you’re ready. The eXile is here to dim the lantern as we guide you through a tour of the most horrible plot the world has ever known: Aging.
Age: Birth to 10 Years
The first three years were nightmare material, from falling out of a uterus to facing the fact that you’re going to be a tetraplegic feces-factory for a couple of years. Come to think of it, that’s how you’re likely to spend your last few years, thanks to modern medicine, so maybe infancy is good training for your slow and expensive stay at the Pray for Death Convalescent Hospital. But Nature, the sadistic tapeworm who set up this existence, doesn’t trust you to deal with the horrible memories of your first three years. That’s why she set up this clever little subprogram: at the age of four, your brain will automatically delete all memories. Every wonder why kids smile? That’s why: they’ve had a brainwipe, and it’s the nicest thing, maybe the only nice thing, Ma Nature will ever do for them.
But from five to puberty it gets better. After you bang your head against the table 10,000 times, your growing brain begins to suspect it might be better to duck. This is how we learn: pain and pain and pain and pain. But at least you’re getting better. Well, taller at least. There are finally other children who are smaller and weaker than you. Nature put these creatures on earth as victims, so after you do your time as jailhouse bitch to the other kids in kindergarten, it’s your turn to torture and fondle the fresh fish. The body understands and appreciates this and becomes happy. This is because the body is a fascist thug.
At the end of the first decade, you’re an old hand. You can make the body do pretty much anything you want. Nothing breaks. Everything heals. And you know, from watching older kids, that there’s this weird mutation ahead, something to do with the wriggly parts of movies.
by John Dolan, eXile | Read more:
Image: uncredited
There’s only one little flaw: you are trapped in the body of a dying animal. In fact, you can see how far gone you are just by testing the skin of that hand of yours. Try pinching the skin on the back of your hand. Now let it go. Count the seconds it takes to smooth itself out. The longer it takes, the older your skin is.
And here’s a really cheering bit of news: your skin, the largest organ in your body, is also the organ which ages most slowly. So however depressing it may be to look at the skin of your hand wearily resuming its proper shape, you can make yourself feel even worse by remembering that things are much, much worse on the inside. Your liver, your lungs, your heart, your joints — all the things you can’t see are decaying much faster than your skin.
When you first see your skin dying, you assume there’s a quick fix: what’s that stuff, rototonin or something? You rub it on and your skin youngs up. But it’s expensive, embarrassing, and only works for a while. You forget to put it on, and the wadis of your skin deepen. Meanwhile, the last fringe of hair has vanished from the Sahel of your forehead, your eyebrows begin to look Brezhnevian, your back is hairier than a tarantula’s, and your breasts are bigger than your wife’s.There’s been a mistake. Someone screwed up the design, with malicious intent. Can you sue Darwin? Can you negotiate an exit from this dying animal? Apparently not. What are we, mere medieval peasants, serfs? Absolutely.
It gets worse. Aging is drying; the cells get scaly, reptilian, sagging like Iguana-hide. It’s not so droll anymore. It invades your dreams: quick cuts of teeth crumbling and hair shedding like an old dog’s ass, in close-ups that scare you awake. (...)
Aging is shrinking: cells wink out and you’re literally a smaller person than you were. You’re a walking brownout. Dead muscle, never to be replaced, is squeezed through your increasingly inefficient anus. In a typical Darwinian joke, the dead cells are processed into hard, unfriendly turds which sandpaper the anus until you grow a little grape-cluster of hemorrhoids. Nature is efficient, and never smacks you once when it can whack you twice.
As biological catastrophes accumulate, more and more of your mental energy is devoted to blocking the signals broadcasting damage and decay from sites all over the body. If you listened to these signals, you’d scream and collapse. You’re a dry-land version of those salmon in the grizzly documentaries, the humped mutant fish whose bodies are dead but still swimming, covered with necrotic patches, constantly flaking away downstream.
All these pain-broadcasts have their bitter stories, most of them reminders of avoidable injuries. The knee — whose fault is that? Yours. Every time you walk more than fifty yards, that knee broadcasts the phrase “bone on bone.” The tissues that were installed at the factory have worn down like old shock absorbers that bang against the frame. Then there’s your heart, and the jaw thing, and your queasy gut. Your fault, your fault, and your fault, respectively.
But the worst torments are the ones too dumb to be tragic — the gnat buzzes of the aging body. There’s a patch of skin in your left ear that starts itching as soon as you get into bed, and grows a pale scab which you must scrape away with the nail of your little finger every week or so. The doctor doesn’t believe in it, and you sound like a whining fool when you try to explain. So you resort to the fingernail-gouging approach. Naturally, it gets infected. This is your own fault. All these trivial nightmares are (a) ridiculous, and (b) your own fault.
You’re married to a slut, a slave: a human body. And try getting a divorce from that wife, baby. When you’re married to your body, it really is “till death do you part.” Short of walking off the tenth floor or eating a 12-gauge, you and your body are as married as a couple of Mormons. That’s Earth, man: one big Utah. Monogamy, you and your body sliding into decay hand in hand. Touching, huh?
But it all started out so well! You replay it over and over (because you seem to spend a lot of hours lying down these days)…but no matter how many times you rewind, it comes out the same way. Let’s face it: you never had a chance, any more than the trilobites did. All you can do is play it back, and back, and back.
Ready? It doesn’t matter if you’re ready. The eXile is here to dim the lantern as we guide you through a tour of the most horrible plot the world has ever known: Aging.
Age: Birth to 10 Years
The first three years were nightmare material, from falling out of a uterus to facing the fact that you’re going to be a tetraplegic feces-factory for a couple of years. Come to think of it, that’s how you’re likely to spend your last few years, thanks to modern medicine, so maybe infancy is good training for your slow and expensive stay at the Pray for Death Convalescent Hospital. But Nature, the sadistic tapeworm who set up this existence, doesn’t trust you to deal with the horrible memories of your first three years. That’s why she set up this clever little subprogram: at the age of four, your brain will automatically delete all memories. Every wonder why kids smile? That’s why: they’ve had a brainwipe, and it’s the nicest thing, maybe the only nice thing, Ma Nature will ever do for them.
But from five to puberty it gets better. After you bang your head against the table 10,000 times, your growing brain begins to suspect it might be better to duck. This is how we learn: pain and pain and pain and pain. But at least you’re getting better. Well, taller at least. There are finally other children who are smaller and weaker than you. Nature put these creatures on earth as victims, so after you do your time as jailhouse bitch to the other kids in kindergarten, it’s your turn to torture and fondle the fresh fish. The body understands and appreciates this and becomes happy. This is because the body is a fascist thug.
At the end of the first decade, you’re an old hand. You can make the body do pretty much anything you want. Nothing breaks. Everything heals. And you know, from watching older kids, that there’s this weird mutation ahead, something to do with the wriggly parts of movies.
by John Dolan, eXile | Read more:
Image: uncredited
