I don’t wear cologne but have an idea for a line of “manly scents.”

• Model Airplane Glue
• Marks-A-Lot
• New Car
• BBQ Chicken Wings (Dry Rub)
• Mimeograph

When people ask my age, I’ll tell them “65 Plus.” After 65, nobody cares how old you are. Media rating services like Arbitron and Nielson have nice, easy-to-remember categories…that stop at 65. So no more birthdays. I’m 65+. It’s really the last age that matters. (Medicare, Social Security, etc)

I’ve reached the age where contemporaries start dying. God’s mortar shells landing ever closer. John D. MacDonald described it best in Pale Gray for Guilt.

“Picture a very swift torrent, a river rushing down between rocky walls. There is a long, shallow bar of sand and gravel that runs right down the middle of the river. It is under water. You are born and you have to stand on that narrow, submerged bar, where everyone stands. The ones born before you, the ones older than you, are upriver from you. The younger one stand braced on the bar downriver. And the whole long bar is slowly moving down that river of time, washing away at the upstream end and building up downstream.

It’s hard to be part of the 65+ demo and not have a sense of your own mortality. I like Scott Adams’ take.

“…we’re a simulated (programmed) world left behind by advanced humanoids that shed their bodies billions of years ago. Our simulated world is the closest they could come to immortality. They were romantics, much like ourselves, and couldn’t stand the thought of being separated from their loved ones for eternity. So in our programmed little world, when we feel a special connection to another, it’s because we knew that person when we were real, and the program allows us to feel it again as if new. Thus, when you meet your soul mate, it is a reunion of sorts. And it will happen over and over, in each subsequent life the program provides for you.”

But Paul Simon said it best for my money.

“I cannot get used to seeing myriads of people in the street peering into little boxes or holding them in front of their faces, walking blithely in the path of moving traffic, totally out of touch with their surroundings. I am most alarmed by such distraction and inattention when I see young parents staring at their cell phones and ignoring their own babies as they walk or wheel them along.”

“Everything is public now, potentially: one’s thoughts, one’s photos, one’s movements, one’s purchases. There is no privacy and apparently little desire for it in a world devoted to non-stop use of social media. Every minute, every second, has to be spent with one’s device clutched in one’s hand. Those trapped in this virtual world are never alone, never able to concentrate and appreciate in their own way, silently. They have given up, to a great extent, the amenities and achievements of civilization: solitude and leisure, the sanction to be oneself, truly absorbed, whether in contemplating a work of art, a scientific theory, a sunset, or the face of one’s beloved.”

The Machine Stops