by T. S. Love

Created on: June 18, 2007   Last Updated: June 29, 2009

One of the questionable perks of my job is that I get to see a lot of naked old people. At first, this was a little uncomfortable and I would politely not look while I was helping them get dressed. After awhile I got kind of numb to it and now my curiosity is bringing me to make some observations.

When we think of naked old people, especially naked old people having sex; we all kinda shudder and cringe, getting a collective mental image of the California Raisins creaking their way through the act in slow motion.

Now, maybe this is obvious, but through my observations I have discovered that old people don't look like shar-peis everywhere. Most of the skin on their bodies looks perfectly normal (discounting a lifetime's accumulation of moles and a multitude of other strange dermatological issues). The only excessively wrinkled skin seems to be that which is visible outside of their clothes: the face, neck, hands, and forearms.

Reluctantly, I came to the logical and again, perhaps obvious, conclusion that the areas with the greatest concentration of wrinkles were those areas commonly exposed to sunlight. There, I said it. I don't like it and I don't want to believe it. I happen to like the sun. I want to pretend to believe that the sun is good and wholesome. It just doesn't seem right that the SUN could hurt us.

This denial is how I justify the fact that I still fry my skin every summer, futilely trying to get a tan; which is ridiculous considering my incontrovertibly fair skin. I'm a slow learner. I generally have to make the same mistakes over and over and over again before I somehow get slapped upside the head with some sort of wakeup call. Well, here it is in living Technicolor: naked old people.

It's odd what can motivate you to change your life. Even though summer is over, tomorrow I'm going to put a tube of sunscreen on my dashboard so I will put it on when I go out. I guess all this is just another symptom of adulthood, that magical time when you realize that not only can your body fall apart on you but that it will indeed do just that.

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