Your body, they say, is a temple. But live long enough and it will become a temple of doom, its walls cracking, its foundation settling, its floors splitting open to reveal pits of boiling lava below.
And isn’t that a wonderful thing?
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Well, maybe “interesting” is a better word. The human body is endlessly entertaining.
You don’t pay a lot of attention to it when you’re young, pretty much taking it for granted. But when you reach middle age — and especially when you reach late middle age — it becomes as interesting as a prestige miniseries, with as many plot twists as “Game of Thrones” or “Breaking Bad.”
At just shy of 60, I wake up every morning thinking, “I wonder what’s going to happen next?”
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Also: “I wonder who I can tell about it?”
When I was younger, I used to hate hearing old people complain about their various aches and pains. Arthritis? Boohoo. Ulcers? Waah waah. Gray hair and wrinkles? Boring.
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But now I revel in the thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to. I want to hear details about how others are decaying and share my dilapidation with them. I mean, my hands alone are worthy of a TED Talk. How did the skin on those appendages go from unlined and dewy to something resembling a dry lake bed, the surface crisscrossed by tiny creases, my knuckles as baggy as a Shar Pei?
How did my hands become my father’s hands?
I know there’s a scientific process at work, something involving the punishing effects of ultraviolet light and the breakdown of collagen. But I like to think my hands — my face, my feet, my guts — are props in a long-running dramedy.
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Somewhere in my body there’s a writer’s room full of MFAs brainstorming the next season. Ideas are tossed out and inked on a whiteboard with a dry-erase marker.
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“Okay, people,” the showrunner says, “we have the basic story arc: John ages and, eventually, dies — as we all must. The good news is the network’s ordered another season. So what are we going to do for the next 12 episodes?”
“Something with moles?” offers one writer. “Like: ‘Is it a mole or is it a freckle?’ ”
“Go on.”
“It turns out it’s neither,” the writer says. “It’s a noncancerous seborrheic keratosis, but our guy has to wait six weeks for a doctor’s appointment and spends that time moping around, wishing he’d stopped to smell the roses more often.”
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“I like it. What else?”
“Something with his toe?” another writer says.
“Such as?” the showrunner says.
“It hurts.”
“That’s it? ‘It hurts’?”
“Yeah, one day he wakes up and it hurts. His big toe, where it joins the foot.”
“Did he do anything to his toe? Bought new shoes? Tripped on the treadmill? Dropped the lid of a Le Creuset Dutch oven on it?”
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“No. It just hurts: dull throb. Hurts for a few episodes, then the pain goes away.”
“Goes away?”
“Yeah, out of the blue. No explanation.”
“Hmmm,” the showrunner says. “That could work. He’s telling everybody that his toe hurts, first his wife, then his friends. He describes it in detail but he never seems to be able to impress on anyone how mysterious it all is, and how symbolic. The throbbing toe is but one reminder of his mortality — of everyone’s mortality. He mentions the mole that wasn’t a mole, too, and the skin on his hands — like a dry lake bed, he says.”
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The showrunner is on a roll now.
“He talks about how just the other day he was shaving when he noticed some tufty gray hairs growing low on his throat, right at his Adam’s apple. He’d never noticed them before and he wonders: Are these neck hairs migrating south or chest hairs migrating north?”
The room bursts into applause.
That’s what I imagine anyway.
And I know the show’s theme song. It’s John Mayer singing “Your Body Is a Wonderland.” Of course, we’ll have to change the lyrics. I think “Your Body Is a Condemned Amusement Park” could work.