The Truth of How We Age

OR

Why I Can’t Remember

When a child is born he is a vast expanse of unmarked brain cells to be put to the use of time. An untouched memory bank. A clean data base. A blank slate. An empty canvas. A tabula rasa. An humongous, honking enormity of space.

In the first five years, he has not yet truly joined the time/space continuum. A very young child doesn’t remember a thing really, because, as most programmers know, downloads cannot be started until formatting is finished. Formatting is done with strained spinach. If the rate of spinach slows below 2 mg per day, we get a condition known as Cerebral Warming. The Bozo Layer gets a hole in it and early memory is the result. Usually clowns.

After five, formatting is pretty much complete. The die is cast. The turkey is done. Experiences begin turning to memories at an alarmingly fast rate. Some children with high experience to memory ratios have been know to run small countries. Others like goldfish as pets. Still, with so much RAM available to 5 years olds, each moment in time, each experience of theirs that becomes memory, is a little like watching an ant in the desert from a 747. It is only when a few ants get together and build an anthill that you get your first time aggregate. This usually occurs when the goldfish dies.

Youth are bored. They rush to fill their database as fast as they can, because experience is the candy of the brain. They are hungry, lustful, greedy little creatures and they think that filling up the brain with anything, willy nilly, is okay (See Youtube). However, no matter what you think of Mozart’s father, he at least understood you need to harness your ants. To get the ants to build the right kind of anthill, you’ve got to have a hook.

Mozart’s hooks were piano keys, and his father hooked a big one. As early as three, Mozart wanted to play like his older sister. He was fascinated by the thing she played. He would crawl up and try to do better than she did. Hooks beget ants and Mozart’s ants wrote symphonies. Go figure.

Hooks also explain what will turn to ants. Let me give you an example. It’s nothing for New Yorkers to walk several miles each day. And yet, if a New Yorker actually SET OUT to walk several miles each day, in the desert for instance, it would never happen. Imagine a New Yorker saying, what a nice Mojave Desert this is, I’m going to walk several miles. No. They would walk ten feet, stop and look for delis. There is nothing to motivate them in the desert. No hooks. Okay maybe a cactus or two. But just TRY walking in Times Square with a blank mind. Oh my God, hooks–visual hooks, advertising hooks, traffic hooks, transvestites dressed as Captain Hook, hookers…frankly, it can be a harrowing experience. But before you know it you’ve walked two miles!

You get my point don’t you? A youth understands the nature of time by the number of hooks (ie. ants) he has experienced. An older person has Times Square. Ergo, time aggregates or moves faster for the older person than for the younger person because of the multitudinous hook factor.

An  older person is an anthill of memory. Ants are everywhere, in fact sometimes they are climbing all over each other (see antediluvian). A younger person is more of an antibody. They have one ant and they play with it.

In early childhood there is no time because there are no ants. In later childhood, they should be home by five. After age six they get bored and start walking in the desert looking for ants. The older they get, the more they experience, the larger the anthills, the closer they get to walking in New York. Some in their 20s just cut to the chase and move to New York.

The older a person gets, the more time aggregates and turns to memory. The more the memory, the more the ants.The more the ants, the less the desert, until the database is full. That is the reason that time seems to go by so much faster in old age than in youth–more ants. And the more the ants, the less the desert (see Las Vegas).

Then Alzheimer’s sets in and a person starts to shed, or literally, ‘kill ants.’ Originally Alzheimer’s was thought to be a narrowly focused disease, but deep alphabetical research has discovered an extra ‘L’ invisible to the naked eye. Ergo, Alzheimer’s or ALL-zheimers applies to all wisenheimers. This means you. The only immunity is death or taxes.

Time aggregates, incorporates, masturbates (see hookers) and finally segregates, or snows, leaving little brain cell snow drifts in your wake. Once Alzheimer’s sets in, all bets are off and ants have little meaning. Unless of course, you like ants.

If you like ants, then it’s another story entirely. But you really must like them. You must do more than just think they are cool or buy them a plastic ant farm. You must truly understand them and offer them droppers of sugar water and keep them entertained and stroke their little exoskeletons. If you do, if you become invested, if you love them, you talk about them, you trade them with your friends, you take them to Little League games and buy them snow cones, you feed them legumes and antipasto, then you can truly cherish time.

Appreciate your ants and they will not depreciate you. That is time’s true antidote. Dote on ants.