Swimming with the sharks

Just being handsome and brilliant is enough

          by Robert LaFrance

          Someone asked me the other day—I think it was Tuesday afternoon—what it was like to be handsome and brilliant. I must admit I smirked a bit. Then he went on: “I’d like to meet somebody like that someday.”
          He was in his twenties, and pondering the slings and arrows of his future. He knew that he himself wasn’t handsome and brilliant, and wondered if it would have helped him in his chosen career, which, according to the things he had just said to me, is apparently suicide.

          I explained a few things to him: “When a person is in his twenties and thirties he seems to be swimming with the sharks—trying to get ahead in life, whether in school or on the job. He generally is able to keep the sharks from devouring him and so goes on to the next stage in his life—doing the family thing. Kids repel sharks, so he is safe for a time.

          “Then the person hits middle age—or it hits him. The kids, his body armour, are gone, but the sharks are back. This time the sharks are younger and stronger, but there are also the older, more experienced brawlers. They all want his job. The vicious creatures, jaws agape, are coming at him from all directions. Our hero should then hang on for dear life, until the glorious day of retirement comes along and he can sit back on his porch, sip lemonade, and watch the sharks devour each other.”

          Speaking of jaws agape, the young man was looking at me as if I had just floated in from the planet Xekon VIII. “I meant…I was just wondering if I should go on a diet,” he said. “I already know a lot of stuff, but if I looked athletic too, do you think the babes would come running?”

          “They certainly would,” I said. “Now, back to my shark analogy…” But by that time he was headed for the fitness centre.

          A few years ago I was a world-class soccer player—if the world includes only southern Kincardine, NB—but now I would do well to play checkers without hyperventilating. A cardiovascular zero. On television I see the world famous Brazilian footballer Pele, who is now is almost 71, and I wonder if I could outrun him even if I were beamed back to age 23 and he carried an anvil duct-taped to his back.

          The point of all this is that, while the old body deteriorates, it only stands to reason that the mind gets sharper and sharper, right? Right?

          Let me put it this way – no. The reason I know this is because I recently bought a 2010 model TV from my daughter and I tried to set it up to work with the 2010 VCR/DvD recorder I bought last year. The two manuals, in English—or what purported to be English—totalled 91 pages.

          I know my sense of humour is famous from Muniac to parts of upper Kilburn, NB, but it didn’t take me long to lose my S of H.  Hooking a few wires onto the TV and a few onto the recorder took 91 pages to explain and, as far as I am concerned, the manual never did explain it. After a total of at least four hours working on the problem, bringing in two other people for ideas, and consuming endless jars of "lemonade", I had set up a remote control to work with each, but never was able to make them recognize each other.

        It was something like a family reunion that was a little too ambitious as to invitations. “Hi, I’m your cousin Zeb from Zagreb. That’s in Croatia.” I guessed that might have been somewhere south of Fredericton.

          “Some assembly required.” That phrase no longer refers to the recently bought TV, or barbecue, or patio wine shelf. Where the ‘some assembly’ is required is in my ancient and nearly worn-out brain. Over the years I have put together TV and VCR as many as a dozen times, and never found it tremendously taxing to the old grey cells. “What is the difference here?” I asked myself, then immediately forgot the question.

         If we look long enough, I am sure we will find a moral to this story, but it isn’t likely. At one time my penmanship was good enough to gain the admiration of a calligrapher, at one time I could play soccer like Landon Donovan, and at one time I had plans to be either a concert pianist or a professional golfer, but the grey cells have deserted me in such numbers that it’s probably no use my continuing my online course to become a brain surgeon (unless I am allowed to operate on myself), so I think I’ll just go fishing.
                                                -end-