As I limp ever nearer the finish line, I find that the partners of more and more of my social media friends are becoming larger-breasted.
I know that it’s wrong of me to spend the latter part of nearly every evening — that preceding my smoking cannabis, removing my contact lenses, and immersing my aching old self in a lovely hot bath — to ogle photographs on Facebook of and fantasise about a former acquaintance’s girlfriend, but I am unable to help myself. She has bewitched me. She has stolen my heart.
I met Former Acquaintance decades ago while trying to put a little orchestra together in my native Los Angeles. He came over to my home on the Sunset Strip one afternoon, and was reasonably cordial. I offered him a place in my orchestra, but he wound up declining it because someone from a competing orchestra gave him a small bag of gold dust, or some cocaine, or something.
His girlfriend has me wondering if I should revise my strong views on cosmetic surgery. To this point, I have customarily made cruel jokes about it, and at one point even designed a T-shirt that proclaimed, “I want to fondle your implants”. But FA’s wife, who’s probably in her mid-50s, has unmistakably Had a Lot of Work Done — she is smooth-faced, and has the high, huge breasts of a 1966 19-year-old Playmate of the Month. It’s cheating, of course, but do I enjoy Mr. Tambourine Man any less for knowing that only one Byrd played on the backing track, with a bunch of Hollywood session guys in pompadours, cardigan sweaters, and menthol cigarettes?
One past long-term life partner of mine had had a nose job in early adolescence, after all, and I was fine with it, even after I realised that she’d probably been fibbing about its having been necessary after breaking her nose. Without her cute little sniffer, she’d have resembled her mother, who was unattractive outside as in. Not long after our union dissolved, she became the second of my long-term life partners to rush out and get her breasts enlarged, and a face lift, whereupon her favourite recreation became displaying herself at swinging nitespots, where handsome young studmuffins would commonly guess her age to be very much less than it actually was. I found that hugely distasteful.
I won’t pretend not to be vain in my own right, and sometimes even to wish I had the dough to get my punim restored to its earlier prettiness. I work out daily to keep myself from getting the belly that’s typical of men my age, but working out seems somehow more, well, noble than getting one’s face cut up. I dress inappropriately, in very tight jeans and black vinyl motorcycle jackets sent to me from China. Former Acquaintance is rather a hipster himself, so maybe his girlfriend will like the cut of my own jib should (a) she and Former Acquaintance split up, (b) I and my own longest-term-to-date life partner split up, and (c) one or both of us moves. We are presently many thousands of miles apart, not figuratively.
I will confess that I find some small consolation in the 19-year-old Playmates of the Month after whom I lusted in vain beginning at around 14, now being in their mid-70s, if they’re still alive at all, and almost certainly rather less intimidating.
Rule 1 of Effective Writing: Always start with a difficult, cumbersome, tangled sentence. Noting that the balance of the piece won’t be so demanding, the reader is overcome with gratitude.
