when you sit right down in the middle of yourself you better have a comfortable chair

I'm terrified of getting old. I never thought I was. My thinking that was more to do with thinking that either (a) age just wasn't going to get its bony fingers around my taut young limbs, oh no, (b) it was so far away as to be laughable, or (c) if I did have to get older, I'd just do it better, more supple-ly, more decadently, more elegantly, more eccentrically than anyone else.

Yeah.

Having been told by a doctor that my stiff, painful knee was the result of a medical condition known as AGEING, and happening across the cruelest magnifying mirror on the planet and therefore meeting my crow's feet for real for the first time, it would appear that, oh shit, I'm not special. Not only will I really, truly have to get older, but it's already happening. Uh-oh.

So I'm taking lessons.

From the majestic Ms Maya Angelou (talking first about how proud she is to see a black man in the whitest of houses, but fro about 6:30, reciting 'Still I Rise' in that honeyed bass of hers that gives me goosebumps):




From the irrepressible hip cat that is Mr Oscar Brown Jr:



And from the inimitable Ed Rondthaler, the best looking, most electric 102 year old I've EVER seen.