Wear Sunscreen.

Now that I'm an old man, I get to see more doctors who insist on doing things to my body that are sure to kill me. I'm sure if I could just avoid seeing any medical professionals, I would live to a ripe old age.

And so every once in a while when this song gets played in my car, I think about my life and how little of it there is left:

"Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth . Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they've faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you'll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked."

from "Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young," Chicago Tribune - June 1, 1997, by Mary Schmich, and turned into a song by somebody.

So here is a picture of me from 1984 when we drove to Daytona Beach during spring break to see REM. Now, other than not wearing sunscreen, that was a pretty good trip. We got drunk; we got hassled by cops; nobody got pregnant. If I set the bar really low, I could argue that I had a pretty good life back then. I had all my hair and I had a tattoo.

I had a friend who told me that the "heart with wings" was a Sufi symbol and recommended that I don't get it as a tattoo. I didn't know anything about Sufism. But when I checked books in the library, I didn't see any mention of a heart symbol:

The symbol of the Order is a heart with wings. It explains that the heart is between soul and body, a medium between spirit and matter. When the soul is covered by its love for matter it is naturally attracted to matter. This is the law of gravitation in abstract form, as it is said in the Bible, ‘Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’ When man treasures the things of the earth his heart is drawn to the earth. But the heart is subject not only to gravitation, but also to attraction from on high, and as in the Egyptian symbology, wings are considered as the symbol of spiritual progress, the heart with wings expresses that the heart reaches upward towards heaven.

But I liked the image of the heart with wings so that's what I got. I probably took my shirt off that day to show it off to everyone. Because that's what cool people do; they let everyone how cool they are by telling them about their tattoos and the places they went and the bands they saw.

But look at that picture. I have the specific memory that I felt that I was fat back then. Now I look at this photo and wonder how I could have thought I was fat. I understand how I thought it because a few years earlier I weighed twenty pounds less, but still, I don't think I look fat in this picture. And now you see the connection to the "wear sunscreen" editorial/poem/song.

And no, I'm not wearing "clown pants." That's my shirt tied around my waist.

I don't know why I've been thinking about dying lately. Maybe it's because my doctor is only scheduling my appointments one week in advance. And he tells me to take a vacation so the time won't go to waste. And when I mention that I want to get a puppy, he laughs, then catches himself, then shakes his head, and suggests I get a goldfish. You think he's trying to tell me something?