This title needs a little work.

So I figure if my grandmother could get 102 years out of a body built in the late nineteenth century, it's completely reasonable for me to expect my twentieth century model to last at least 140. That's 140 good years, mind you - all the usual caveats about being able to swallow all my spit and deposit any other physical creations of mine directly into the appropriate plumbed receptacles apply. I'd also really, really like to forgo the fart-as-you-walk thing. I'm willing to exchange clippable toenails for that one.

I not only think it's possible, I think it's likely. No, I am not forgetting all the things I've inhaled, drank, and eaten. I'm looking at the people who taught me how to inhale, drink, and eat all that crap. The people whose beautiful young bodies started breaking down when mine was still growing new and exciting things in feminine places.

Thank you, baby boomers. Thank you for smoking, toking, drinking, and living on soda pop and the fine family of Hostess products. Thank you for taking your youth for granted, and for freaking out when you discovered that you'd decimated it.

I guess what I'm really trying to say is thanks for botox. And tummy tucks. Thank you for laser eye surgery and for advanced dentistry techniques. Thank you for every revolutionary nip and age defying tuck. Thank you for sacrificing any communist principles you may have held in your youth for self serving, scientific research funding capitalism the minute you realized that the arteries in a heart full of love can clog up like a sink fed bacon grease and coffee grounds just as easily as the cold dead pipes in the chest of an industrialist can.

Most of all, thank you for doing it first. Thanks to your legacy of wanton excesses and panicked regrets, all the technologies will be perfected and all the prices will be competitive by the time I need to start booking appointments.

None of this should be taken as an admission to my having or even considering getting work done, mind you. I wilt like a tender little flower at the very suggestion of such stigma. It's all very progressive and open minded to get a tattoo or a piercing, but pump a few CCs of saline into your boob and people start looking at you like great grandma looked at that hussy who had the bold faced temerity to bleach her hair just like those common tramps in the moving pictures.

Why can't people just grow old gracefully? Because people can grow old any damn way they please, and the older they get the less of a damn they give what anybody thinks about it.

It will all be irrelevant soon, thank goodness. When the technology evolves to the point or a practice becomes popular enough that you can't be sure the person you're talking to hasn't had the same work done as the person you're trying to ridicule, that's the point at which a body modification becomes socially acceptable. By some extraordinary coincidence.

This post has been brought to you by the color gray, because it occurred to me the other day that I have no idea what the average age is for people to start to go gray since almost nobody ever does anymore. Nation of bold faced hussies, that's what we are!

Now everybody under the age of 45 go hug a baby boomer, and thank them for giving you the option of dying old and leaving a good looking corpse.