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the Universe?
    Of COURSE, it IS happening to ME—I can only pitifully pray at this point that I DON’T get all that I so richly DESERVE, Karmically speaking. I look in the mirror and I feel a Mr. Bill moment coming on—“Oooooooohhhh, noooooooo!” And I realize as I write this—there are MILLIONS of people out there who are TOO FUCKING YOUNG to even KNOW WHO MR. BILL IS…was…OOOOOOOHHHH, NOOOOOOO!
    It always felt like I was, oh, like, sort of IT, y’know? The Universe just more or less culminated with me and my generation and we couldn’t really see any NEED—let alone likelihood—that there would actually BE more generations after us and we certainly never foresaw that WE would move inexorably into the slot FORMERLY occupied by our MOMS and DADS—that WE would become the inhabitants of Geezerville. And yet here we are—the train has screeched to a halt and we have all been herded off onto the platform in the freezing rain and the sign on the station clearly reads, welcome to geezerville—now let’s see how you like it, you snotty little shits! And we can hear our parents snickering from the shadows.
    We are all wailing, “OOOOOOOOHHHH, NOOOOOOO!” and laughing hysterically at this joke for the ten-thousandth time—and the young folks riding away on the train have no earthly idea what is so fucking funny about “Oooooohhhh, noooooo!”—or how we could find ANYTHINGto even SMILE about at this point in our lives, since we all look pretty well done-for in their opinion.
    Okay, so I have come face-to-face with proof positive that my own personal mama was, in truth, once a young and vibrant being and there is also a fair pile of pretty convincing evidence that one of the two persons largely responsible for any loss of said youth and vibrancy would most definitely be memyownself. (By the way, for the record, somewhere along the way Mama stopped being a Mere Ordinary Mortal in my estimation and became an almost godlike creature of infinite wisdom and valuable experience. I’m pretty sure her elevation probably coincided not surprisingly with the birth of my OWN daughter and the stunning realization that I was myownself soon to become someone else’s Mere Ordinary Mortal and the object of all HER scorn and derision. Experience is the best source of Empathy, is it not?)
    So, from gazing in gape-mouthed disbelief at the photographic proof of Mama’s former fabulosity, the natural progression took me to my OWN photo albums containing substantiation for the possibility that what went around had indeed come around and that Mama wasn’t the ONLY old gray mare that ain’t what she used to be, many long years ago.
    There I was in photo after photo taken at beaches and pools, local and worldwide, wearing as little as possible—and looking pretty good in it (or out of it, as the case may have been), fairly flawless thighs included—but what was the source of that mysterious total body sheen, glimmering in the sun? My über-tan body did not appear to be so much WET as it did, well, GREASY.
    Oh, yes. I remember now. Wherever we were, we baked in the sun for HOURS on end, day after day, all summer long, every summer. We didn’t even actually wait for summer to officially arrive. If we got a chance to go to the beach and it was only 60 degrees but sunny—we would dig a body-sized hole in the sand and stretch out in it, out of the wind, and toastily roast ourselves in the pit.
    We not only worshipped the sun—we offered our bodies up as greased sacrifices to it by covering our exposed skin—which was mostly all the skin we individually possessed—with BABY OIL. Ever put butter on a chicken before you bake it? Gives you that delicious golden-brown CRISPY skin—mmm-hmmm—that’s what we did to our very own skin that we knew full well we were gonna have to live in for the REST of our lives. But did we