My kind of marathon

I think I might be in trouble.

I said I’d run a marathon this year and the prognosis is not good.  Already.  January 2, 2015 and I’m unsure of the outcome. 

No.  Actually I am sure.  I will not run a marathon this year.  Or next year.  Ever.  I will never run a marathon.

Whew.  That feels better.  Next December I’d like to look myself in the face and say something besides, “What the heck were you thinking with that ridiculous idea?!!”

Oh all right.  I didn’t even say I’d run a marathon.  That would have been stupid. 

I’m optimistic.  I’m game.  I am many things – including old with gravely knees.  And I am well aware that there’s no way I will run a marathon in this incarnation. 

Don’t get me wrong.  I can still do things.  For example, I might walk with a hurried expression.  Urgently.  Step aside!  I’m walkin’ here!

Maybe I’ll even lift my arms and do that exaggerated marching thing like a speed walking drum major.  Yeah.  That’s it.  I’ll cast dignity aside and churn my way through the New Year.

But, remember Ellen DeGeneres talking about her grandma beginning a new fitness regime at age 65?  “She started walking five miles a day.  Now she’s 72 and we don’t know where the hell she is!”

That could be me!  So, no long distance escapades on the horizon.

Unless of course we think in terms of the Twilight Zone.  I could run that marathon.  Thank you Hulu.  Season 1, Episode 1!  Here we go!

Oh yeah, I love this one!  “Where Is Everybody?”  Remember?  The guy who “finds himself in a town devoid of people and with no memory of who he is.”

It’s so creepy:  The diner with the jukebox playing.  Hot coffee on the stove and pies cooling on the counter, but no waitress.  No fry cook! 

A gas station without an attendant.  A mannequin in a delivery van.  A phone ringing but nobody on the line.

Even an empty police station with a lit cigarette burning in the ashtray.  At last, a clue.  Rod Serling has been here.

Curiously, none of these aberrations stop the man from talking right out loud.  He prattles on and on.  He just wants to know who he is and why he’s wearing that jumpsuit.    

This is awesome!  You can power through every episode in order, or you can pick and choose. 

Good.  I’m skipping the one with the misanthrope who buys a player piano that makes everyone tell the truth.  Spoiler alert:  They all hate him. 

And the one where Burgess Meredith is a bookworm and the sole survivor of a nuclear holocaust only to break his glasses and be unable to read.   Sorry!

I want to find the one where William Shatner sees a yeti dancing on the wing of an airplane at 20,000 feet.  Or the one where he and his new wife have car trouble in a small town and he starts to live by the fortunes dispensed from a one-cent slot machine. 

“Will we leave town soon?” asks our future Captain Kirk.  “Only time will tell!” replies the fiendish contraption!  Oh my god!

I love that goofy spiraling cone in the opening sequence.  And the blinking eye!  I love the funky sets and the cheesy technology – Season 1 Episode 3 has the protagonists preparing for a direct nuclear attack by telling them to take their radios with them to the center of the house. 

I love looking for that picture of the Scotty dog that hangs on the wall in multiple episodes.  They must have been working on the cheap!

Serling’s recurring themes – space travel, time travel, regret, annihilation and death.  Love turned upside down.  Purgatory.  Hell.  Rod had it going on!  Misguided notions of heaven and beauty.  Greed.  No wonder this show was so successful. 

Remember the one where Old Man Simpson turned down admission to heaven because St. Peter said his hound dog Rip couldn’t come in?  Makes an Okie appreciate the Pope!

I could go on indefinitely, which is good considering Season 1 has 36 episodes!  And five seasons altogether make a marathon!

I know!  I’ll find the one where Robert Redford plays Mr. Death!  I mean really – what a way to go.

Smile! You're the Candid Camera!

Now you can hear with your teeth.  If you need to.   

It’s not for everyone, of course.  But entrepreneurs in medical science have devised a gadget for those who are deaf in only one ear, or “single-side deaf.”    

Aptly named the “SoundBite,” it’s comprised of two transmitters; the one you wear in your deaf ear picks up sound signals on that side and sends them to pre-wired molars on the other side.  Then the molars use the second transmitter to forward the sound signals through the bones in your skull to your hearing ear.  Weird, but miraculous.   

And it gives an entirely new meaning to ‘Radiohead.’ 

I’m a little hung up on how it works if someone knocks on the door on your left and you hear it from the window on your right.  Or what if there’s signal interference from, say, SETI?   

But hey, my grandma’s knee predicted the weather.  I always knew when to bundle up, so who am I to argue?    

I’m not surprised at this latest invention.  After all, it wasn’t that long ago when we saw pictures of lab rats with ears growing out of their backs.  No, not rat ears.  Human ears.  Lab techs cultivated ears for future use in little peripatetic plantations, like rootless, itinerant Christmas tree farms.  Ewww.  

But it’s all for the good.  Burn victims and anyone doing a few rounds with Mike Tyson could benefit. 

It was only a matter of time before other body parts were re-purposed in today’s “green” climate. 

We have more teeth than we need anyway, so why not rethink the whole mastication thing?  Shift it all to the front, rodent style, and set aside a few back teeth and those canines for a quiet day, if you get my meaning.  The Tooth Fairy will have to reinvent himself, but the world’s changing, man.  Adapt or die.   

Horticultural grafts have had us harvesting peaches from apple trees for decades.  The internet is rife with videos of momma dogs raising baby squirrels.  It’s no wonder we accept these kinds of “cross pollination” as routine.   

But carry it to its logical extreme and next thing you know we’ve got Sodom and Gonorrhea.  No, wait…I didn’t mean that.  Spell check is messing with me.  I meant that Biblical thing.  You know - the foundation of Las Vegas?  Sloth and Greed!?  No – Sparkle and Flash!?  Oh forget it. 

I’m ambivalent, that’s all.  

OK look, at my age, I’m all for it, this new-fangled angle on body parts.  Repurpose a tooth?  Sign me up!  Reuse bone marrow?  I’m there.  Refurbish the ragged, the weary, the long-in-the-tooth?  Oh yeah, count me in.   

I’ll tell you what I’d like to see recycled.  Robert Redford.  Like American Pickers with an eye for treasures heaped up in a hoarder’s back bedroom, new age scavengers could pick him up for a song.  Take him back to the shop; sand him down with #3 grit; rub in a honey glaze and finish him off with a coat of satin sealant.  Hollywood could still get a lot of use out of him.  But no!  We’re all too ready to cast off the classics.  

Instead, we have Wayne Newton.  A cautionary tale of misguided science and misspent technology.   

You can see why I’m torn. 

Just watch.  Now that Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp have crossed the threshold from fresh and plump on their way to shriveled and mossy, like so many Marlon Brando’s, they’ll wind up on a Tinsel Town junk pile when they could be aged like a single malt scotch.   

I’m not a Luddite, really.  I love the gadgets and apps.  I’m young.  I’m hip, or hep, or sick or cool.  Whatever.  Heck, I’ll go bionic when the time comes.  Or piecemeal me.  I’m good with it. 

In fact, in the spirit of progress, I offer these visionary suggestions for advances on the dental front.  Why not put our network where our mouth is?  We could link our teeth to Facebook and chatter away.  We can update our status while whitening.  

And why stop there?  Mount MP3 players, digital cameras, Angry Birds apps and home monitoring systems all around the grille. 

We’ll call it a Swiss Army mouth.  Say cheese!