You look back through all of the history books and you see how far mankind has come in the past 100 years and you have to wonder what happened. For a while we were inventing things like airplanes and weed eaters and then it just kind of like stopped. The movies had us believing we would be traveling in flying cars, being teleported through space, and having robots walk our dogs by now. What the heck happened? There’s not quite enough evidence to charge George Lucas with false advertising but it does make the old “what have you done for me lately” phrase come up. I believe we are still hard at it but it all has focused towards technology and medicine more than big ticket items like space ships. While the technology innovations are visible if you look, all we ever do is hear about the medical inventions. Not a month goes by that you don’t hear about some medical breakthrough happening but it takes them around 20 years to make it out to us. It is always being tested on lab rats.
We read about new drugs that cure the common cold. We read about medicines that stop baldness. We read about drugs that cure memory loss. We read about possible cures for cancer. We read , we read, and while we all are out here semi bald with hacking coughs and worried about eating an orange because of the cancer causing pesticides it might be coated in, the rats are all running around barefoot in the snow with hair that looks like John Kerry smoking cigarettes and happy as heck. These rats are light years ahead of us when it comes to immunity to diseases and disasters. I used to think that when Armageddon does come, the only things that would survive would be cock roaches and Cher but now I have to add rats to the list.
While somewhat impatiently annoyed, I have always felt like all this testing was probably a necessity but the other day something came about that changed my mind. I heard on the radio that scientists think they have come up with a drug that stops the aging process and could allow us to live to be 180. When I heard this I stopped in my tracks. This is great news but there was one key word in this that made the hair on my neck stand up. The word was “stops”. If the word had been “reverses” I would have jumped up and down but the word wasn’t “reverses”. It was “stops”. That means that whenever you take this drug, you don’t age anymore and you live to be 180. Great news if you are currently 20 years old but knowing it will take 20 years or more to get this miracle drug out, I don’t know if I like this or not.
Now I’m not currently what I would consider old. I’m not 60 yet but I’m close enough to it to smell it. Back when I was 16 I used to think 60 was dinosaur-istic but then I blinked a couple times and I’m there. I’m at the age now where my body is starting to act more and more like an old English sports car. Now this comparison might seem unusual but if you’re getting old and you’ve ever had an old English sports car you will know what I mean. One day you wake up and your wipers don’t work for no apparent reason. The next day your head lights won’t come on. Some days you have trouble starting especially if it’s cold. So far my convertible top hasn’t refused to come up buy based on all of the commercials on TV I suspect that is in the works. As a friend of mine once told me “Getting old is not for the meek.”.
Now if you combine the daily aging process with the 20 year wait while they test this stuff on rats, you get what I think is a disastrous combination. 20 years from now I will be 80 years old. 80 years old. At 80 I will be creeping around in bedroom slippers and flannel pajamas looking strikingly like Yoda mumbling that I can’t find my oatmeal spoon and 85 year old rats will be doing cartwheels in the kitchen one saying to the other “Yes, I remember that old guy. He was a damper looking individual when he was younger. I remember back in 1979 when he chased me out of his living room with a broom.”. I don’t want to live to be 180 spending the last 100 years of my life as an 80 year old fart. I want to spend the last 120 years of my life looking and acting like I do now. It ain’t great but it ain’t 80 either. Get this stuff bottled up and get it out here. They can test it on me. If it doesn’t work, what’s the worst that could happen? I wake up one day after taking it and I’m one day older than yesterday. I can live with that. They can go back and tweak it a little and try it on me again. I’ll take my chances. I’m a gambling man especially when the stakes are this high.
I’m looking for a couple more comparably aged individuals to volunteer with me and let’s boot the rats out of this testing process. We can do it if we can get the numbers on our side. If logic doesn’t work, we may have to storm the place. I believe we can take the scientists. It’s those lab rats that worry me.
