My Face Is Sliding Off My Head

"My Face is sliding off my head." I say this outloud as I examine myself in the mirror, checking and reconfirming that I’m not getting any younger. My slackening jaw line is in no way cute and unfortunately a inevitable fact of gravity. While the onslaught of time is cruel and unkind – who likes to see their face slide off their head? I am struck by the notion that no matter how I age into my mid-life, I’m still a high school student working diligently at life the same way I struggled in Mr Putorti’s 10th grade trigonometry class – I tried the formulas, tapped on my calculator and put it all down on paper but always with one eye on the clock. I was there but never really there, present but never engaged. I never really tried. And so, I’m still approaching life as I always have, except now with the knowledge that time is ticking – tick, tock, tick, tock, take a chance you stupid ho.
Now, adult life is like high school with fatter, more wrinkled kids. And I sometimes wonder if I’m present but not engaged. I want don’t want to be here, you see. I want to be there -- LA, Cabo, The French Riviera, Sundance – cavorting with Tara Reid or Tommy Lee and his penis or Beyonce and hers. I want to play like a child and run around half naked and have paparazzi photograph me nude as I stretch on my private balcony after having sex with entire cast of The O.C, even Peter Gallagher and his eyebrows. I want a scandal to rock my world and a lawsuit to follow after these photos find their way to a website and a Details article about the penis size of male celebrities. Instead, I dress in Express Men’s button down shirts and smart flat front pants where I keep my penis modestly hidden away. I’d like a weiner scandal or a paternity lawsuit that confuses my family back home and all my gay friends who’ve never known me to sleep with women.
I’ll do anything to keep perpetually 18 - 25, the MTV demographic I’ve so mourned the loss of as I’ve slipped deeper into my 30's. I want to suspend in a moment of youthful exuberance and leap into the pages of InTouch or US Weekly, Hollywood’s year books. I want a permanent tan that’s applied like cooking spray. I want to talk about my fast metabolism and that’s why I’m so skinny and not because I puke or eat a steady diet of air, cigarettes and Red Bull. I want to wear wildly inappropriate, large reflecting pool sunglasses and date someone with the same first name as myself, whose last name ends in "adopolous". I want to stay young, fit, sexy and, most importantly, smokin’ hot. I want to get pregnant so I can loose the weight "fast" after working out seven hours a day, because that’s what most mothers get to do. Of course, as a man, the pregnancy stuff is tough – but I still want to work out seven hours a day – It would mean that that was my job. And that my job wouldn’t be my job. Which mean I’d be rich or have a sugar daddy or mommy. If it keeps me young and beautiful and barely skimming reality, sign me up. I could look at myself all day and stay stuck and enjoy it.
I want it all, not this mundane existence where I age, go to work, have messy relationships where I can’t say I love you; fuck the wrong people; fuck over the right ones; try to be kind to my family even though I want to light them on fire; try to make a difference. I want a tabloid existence, where I’m only seen at parties or on holiday. I don’t want the uncomfortable ick and mess of real life, where things don’t wrap up so tidy after my publicist does a spin cycle. I want denial of all the inevitable truths about life and age and death. I want to be the "it boy" posing for the celebrity mags. I want to win the senior poll. I want best looking, most likely to succeed, best abs, I want it all. And I want my frame of reference to eternally be grades 10 - 12.
That’s why I love 50 year-old gay men in Abercrombie and Fitch. It’s desperate. It’s an over-identification with the cute boys in the billboard. It’s false. There are hot 50 year old for sure, but even that hot 50 year-old in Abercrombie is a desperate attempt to stay relevant long past the MTV demographic has expired. I’ll let you know what I do when I get there. If you see me with a Von Dutch cap turned sideways, sign me up for lethal injection or at the least a mild shock therapy. Hopefully by that time, I’ll be happy with here, and not care about there. Here’s to hoping.
My face continues to slide, and it will. Aging doesn’t stop. All you can hope for is a few expressions of disbelief when someone younger finds out you’re the age you’re at. "Oh god, I thought you were 27!" "Me", I’d reply, mock surprised. "No. I’m not. Now, seven years, ago, maybe, but no, I’m 34." As I’m saying this I think of the at home peel I have sitting in my medicine cabinet. The bowls of blueberries and other age defying fruits that I readily ingest. The way I hang from my ankles like a bat when I sleep at night. How I grow disappointed in myself that I can’t sleep like Cleopatra in a tomb and instead toss and turn and lie on my face, adding to my wrinkle potential. And then I think something slightly deeper than the shallow waters I’m wading in. That this focus on the external, the lines in my face that will be deep enough to hold coins (have you seen my dad?), is all subterfuge -- a form of resistance that keeps me worrying about the inevitable and uncontrollable and from not achieving the tangible. It’s bullshit and it’s got to stop. Here’s to being here and not there. It begins today.