I was thinking the other day that in the not-too-distant-future, geologically speaking, people will come think of me as old. Like really old.

Sometimes I look in the mirror and think, dude, what’s with all the wrinkles? Next time someone tells you to smile for the camera, don’t. Those goddam creases are so deep you could lose your keys in there.

However, I’m not yet ancient, despite my skin folds, and before you know it it’ll be 2164 and there I am at 200 years and still alive, in a manner of speaking. Part my own flesh and blood. Part reclaimed organs. Part robotics. Meanwhile, you’re dead. Ha! How la like me now?!

And the younger set – people barely past 100 – start tooling on me because I’m so ancient: “Look at that old wrinkly bastard!” Because by then my wrinkles will really be something to marvel at. The hurtful names would run the gamut:

• Wrinkles McVay
• Old Wrinkleface
• Mr. Wrinklepuss
• The wrinkly old bat who lives down the road
• Herr Wrinklehausen
• Sir Wrinklot
• That a-hole with all the wrinkles
• Senor Muchas Arrugas.
• McVay that wrinkled sonuvabitch!
• Old Fuzzy Wrinkleball
• Lieutenant McWrinkle

You can imagine that the list is practically endless. I will have learned to deal with it by the time I’m 200, attributing the ribbing from people literally half my age to sheer jealousy. Plus, I may not notice all the name-calling, since I’ll be sleeping a lot, I’m told. That’s what happens when you’re 200, which I will be in a little less than a century and a half.

Hard to imagine it’s going to happen so soon.

Is this the year when I break out of my landlocked state and start boating seriously? It could be. I look like a boater, when I’m at the helm with a big grin on my face and zinc oxide on my nose, like it’s 1969 and I’m a lifeguard at Green Lakes State Park.

Maybe it was more like ’72, but it sounds better to say ‘69, which was a year of upheaval during which humans set foot on the moon and half of the world’s musicians died of drug overdoses. I was 5 in 1969; it seems reasonable to assume that I probably visited the beach at Green Lakes State Park, where I first saw the white, zinc-slathered noses of yesteryear.

Meanwhile, people in other states weren’t bothering with zinc oxide. “Zinc Oxide is for Pussies,” was their slogan. They would gather together without masks or a pocketful of zinc and give the finger to the sun. They believed the sun was full of shit, the jerky central orb of our solar system, around which everything circles. A pitiful and angry little glowing ball of burning gases, ticked off because it is relatively insignificant in our universe.  

Most of those maskless and zinc oxide-less folks are now dead from getting cancer of the nose, and their ashes are scattered all over creation. The rest of us are still alive, enjoying the pandemic.

Maybe we should have skipped the zinc oxide.

I was recently visited by a young stonemason (that is, a stonemason, not a stoned mason), who mentioned something about his training “back in the day.” He didn’t look old enough to have an actual period in his life that could be called “back in the day,” but you couldn’t say the same for me, and suddenly I was transported to my very own “back in the day,” when I worked at Mass General Hospital as a young 20-something, some 100 years ago.

I was a brain surgeon back then. I’d cut into people’s heads to fix aneurisms and so forth, and occasionally would screw with people’s minds by performing a little sneaky rewiring, as a kind of practical joke. It was hilarious to visit patients afterward and see them try to drink from a cup of water but instead pour the water over their heads or throw it into their faces. (Don’t worry – I’d always fix it later, for a relatively small fee.)

When I wasn’t performing high-end brain surgery, I was ordering supplies, making photocopies, and answering phones for the cardiac unit. I’d get calls from vendors about bills, and sometimes from lab personnel calling in sick. “Cough, hack, achoo! Tell Dr. Stragglebeard that I’ve got the dreaded cantankervirus, and I’m very contagious.”

One guy always used to tell me when his wife had diarrhea. “Can you tell Jerry that I have to take care of the kids today? It’s my wife: she’s throwing up, diarrhea, whole bit.” I heard this often over my tenure. When he called in sick, diarrhea was often involved.

I was made to tell his boss these details each time. The throwing up. And the diarrhea.

Now you understand what life was like back in the day. Wasn’t pretty, that’s for sure.

Of the thousands of things that this godforsaken coronavirus headache has made me appreciate about those days, not so long ago, when I could walk down the street, breathe the air in deeply, and exhale it upon just about whomever I pleased, none seem quite so unlikely to return any time soon as the live rock show.

Dammit, I had tickets to Pussy Riot! And Antibalas, if you must know. And, on just about every-other Friday night at the Lizard Lounge, Club D’elf.

Cut to this current moment in time: it is late May of 2020 and my best rock show opportunities are happening via YouTube. And that’s not going change any time soon. You can’t even go to church right now, let alone a rock concert. As God has lobbyists aplenty, I’m pretty sure churches will get the green light to change water to wine in front of a live audience well before a bunch of aged punks like X will be allowed to play the song White Girl while people scream and applaud wildly.

The fake news media is bound to claim that wild applause is not only a symptom of Covid-19, but is also a means of spreading the virus, alleging that when people smack their palms together, as they do when they see a good rock show, the dried-on virus particulates that are hidden in the creases of their palms are dispersed like sound waves into the atmosphere, where the virus particulates then deploy wings and make a bee line for random strangers’ nostrils and open mouths.

Don’t believe the hype. The germs known to be dispersed by enthusiastic applause are thought to prefer clogging up pores rather than sinus cavities, which is considered not a very effective means of infecting the host. Ergo, fear not wild applause.

Once my message gets out I suspect a goodly number of people will applaud my efforts to get rock going again. But please don’t applaud too loudly. I don’t want my pores getting any more clogged up than the already are.