The problem with having time to stop and think is that you have time to stop and think. And that's all you can do. How did I get to be 44 years old? Surely it was only yesterday I was bitching about being 40 -idiot! I'd love to be 40 now. I will never look back and wish I was 44 though. NEVER! Forty-four is just stupidly old. When is the clock in my mind going to synchronise with the clock of my body. I still feel 23 inside. I have the psyche of Dorian Grey. Enjoy yourself,it's later than you think. No point in telling you youngsters that though. Middle age hits you like a sledgehammer.
Much better to keep so busy that you don't have time to contemplate where or who you are, to merely exist and then, when your body can take no more, to collapse without having realised a thing about anything. Without work to keep me distracted I can only contemplate my own mortality and worse my decline into decrepitude.
The average patron of this health farm is probably a woman in her late 50s. There are a few couples where you suspect the boyfriend has been dragged along to keep his girlfriend happy, but I think I am the only man here who suggested coming here. My girlfriend is happy enough being here, but I am clearly odd. A middle-aged woman trapped in the body of a slightly younger but still middle-aged man.
But I look at my fellow guests, mainly a little bit older and at least externally more female than me and I see the way their minds have slipped, their memories are less reliable, their bodies slipping gradually towards the grave and wonder how aware one is that one is losing one's faculties. Do you feel it as another slice of your brain closes down? Do you miss it when it's gone? Or does your mind just fold over and cover the damage so you don't notice it has gone unless you look very hard for the join? And even then you won't be sure of what has gone. And most pertinently has the process started with me? Is my brain slowly declining? Will I become grouchier and scattier and more right wing? Or has that already begun and I can't tell? Because my own sense of who I am has altered already.
I think I am still the same person inside, but the problem is that I would anyway. I am slowly being replaced by a sagging replicant of myself - less efficient, less spritely, more wrinkled. I believe I am still me, but if you plugged in my 20 year old mind so he could share the space I don't think he'd recognise much that was him. He'd see this for what it is - some kind of switcheroo. I am not me. I am a cuckoo in the nest. I am programmed to believe I am me, like Arnold Schwarzenegger in the greatest film of all time "Total Recall". You think this is the real Herring? I am not so sure.
I am having a lovely time, but you know, I shouldn't be given the space to think about anything.
