Thoughts from the ammo line

Ammo Grrrll asks a rhetorical question: SO IT’S COME TO THIS, HAS IT? She writes:

Not to alarm dear readers or anything, but a couple of things have happened since our cohort all pretended to have been at Woodstock: namely, we got old and infirm and the world has gone completely mad around us. When did this happen? Boy, I can’t count the times that I have heard that stupid saying about putting frogs in cold water and then slowly turning up the heat so that they don’t jump out until it’s too late. But who knew that was actually a thing? I mean, who would even boil a frog for any reason?

Oh sure, we noticed a few things. The excellent novelist Max Cossack reported to me in his early 30s that he had gone to play a game of pickup basketball at the Y with friends and he leapt up for the ball and NOTHING HAPPENED! He did not leave the ground, which surprised and dismayed him. And this was a guy who still weighed within a few pounds of what he weighed in high school and who worked out several times a week, but no Tim Duncan, he.

A t-shirt I saw recently mourned this shift amusingly: “Childhood injuries: falling off the bike, falling out of a tree; Adult injuries: sleeping wrong; sitting too long; sneezing.” Pathetic. My friend, Randy, who I have written about on numerous occasions, once sneezed without bracing for it and was reduced to lying on the living room floor for over a week! He, who was once a 20-year-old combatant in LZMary in Vietnam. He, who set track records in his Sioux City, Iowa high school that were not broken for over 25 years.

I have written previously of my infamous “Sudoku Injury” in which I sat bent at an angle over the table working a 6-star level Sudoku puzzle for a couple of mindless, frustrating hours until I attempted to get up and felt a worrisome “snap” and found that I could not straighten up any further than Groucho Marx walking with his cigar. That was in my late 50s and the muscle spasm lasted for three agonizing days.

Also discussed on at least a couple of occasions has been my rotator cuff injury sustained in a losing dustup with a sliding glass door. Since that revoltin’ development, I bet I have seen 20 other people roughly my age in the tell-tale slings. “Rotator cuff?” “Yup”. “So sorry.”

There’s no telling how the Hammacher Schlemmer catalogue folks got somebody to sell them my name and address. But I used to see it once in a while in the distant past when it featured high end adult toys (no, not that kind…) for people with way too much money who need a life. Well, guess what they mostly offer now? Let me list a few items:

The Easy Read Clock; The Voice Clarifying Over Ear Amplifier; The Compression Knee Massager; The Chin and Neck Toner (with humiliating picture); The Pain Relieving Foot Tent; The Neck and Shoulder Heat Wrap; The Strongest Outdoor Rocker (can support 600 lbs. – Seriously?! For the 500 lb Grandma and her 100 lb Grandbaby?); The Under Clothing Lumbar Pain Relieving Belt; The Plantar Fascitis Orthopedic Walking Shoes; The Crow’s Feet Reducing Skin Toner Wand; The Circulation Improving Hand/Wrist Massager; The Circulation Improving Leg Wraps. The LED Lip Rejuvenator, a steal at just $99.95; The Best Compression Socks. It goes on. Believe me, it goes on.

Do you see the pattern here? The target market is wealthy, old and has “issues.” Some of these issues involve better living through chemistry. The Golf Channel, for example, is largely sponsored by Cialis, featuring happy couples resting comfortably post-encounter in separate waterless outdoor bathtubs for reasons best known only to themselves.

And the world around us? Most of it you couldn’t even make up.

When I was a young married lass, Gillette used to sponsor Friday Night Boxing, called the Friday Night Fights. “Be all a man can be!” said their ads. I was never a boxing fan, but often, as young marrieds working all week and feeling stressed, we would get particularly cranky at each other on Friday nights and we used to joke that Gillette should sponsor our spats.

It’s no secret what the chowderheads who run the company now are sponsoring. Its latest ad featured an African-American father showing his daughter, now taking enough hormones to grow facial hair and pretend to be a male, how to shave. Oh, Lord, make it stop! Make it stop!

Most men I know do not LIKE shaving every day, especially black guys and Jewish guys with curly hair that gets all ingrown and problematic. DELIBERATELY choosing to grow facial hair would be right up there – though actually nowhere even close – to deliberately deciding to have monthly periods. Fortunately for all the transitioning guys pretending to be women, that is not at all in the cards. I am told – though, in the manner of Agent Maxwell Smart, “I ASKED YOU NOT TO TELL ME THAT!” – that it is possible to fashion a reasonable facsimile of some lady bits, but making those parts mortify you by staining your nice white skirt in seventh grade English class will not be happening. That’s because you aren’t ever going to be an actual female. Not ever. Get used to it. You will do better to pretend to be Napoleon.

Commenter friends: If someone had asked you 10 years ago whether thousands of illegals A WEEK would cross our border, pretending to be with children, pretending to be fleeing persecution, 90 percent not showing up for the hearings to address those fraudulent claims for asylum, and every Democrat, the Chamber of Congress, the Koch Brothers, and a shocking number of Republicans would be more than fine with that – would you have believed them?

Would you have believed the Democrats would boo Israel and – why not? – God, at a California convention? Would you have believed that the Democrats would vote against the First Amendment’s right to free speech? Would you have believed that in the party of JFK — who was undone when his little premature baby, Patrick, died 2 days after birth — the single most important plank in the Democrat platform would be the right to kill babies in the 9th month and beyond?

Yeah, me neither.

And now I have to lie down and rest on my Gel Topped Mattress Rejuvenator while I put on my Osteoarthritis Under Clothing Knee Brace. See you next Friday. Try not to sneeze.

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