Like Sand Through The Hourglass...

These are the days/daze of my life.. (My knowledge of daytime soap operas start and stop with that tagline. I swear.)

In fifth grade, I acquired my first library card. I recall seeing the expiration date: it read "1978". I thought "Why even bother put a date that is so far away?". It was 1975 and, to me, 1978 might has well been a date in which the world became a 24/7 scene from the film Blade Runner. It was just so flippin' far away.

Tomorrow will be 2009 and I've pretty much resigned myself to the fact that, by mid-week next week, the year will be 2033.

Of all the Mark Twain-isms, Youth is Wasted on the Young might be his most profound. I can say that now I've reached the age where I have hair sprouting out of places that I didn't even know I had body parts.

What a great gig he had, by the way. Writing stories, wearing strange hats, growing and grooming his shag-carpet mustache and rattling off aphorisms so memorable that they still regularly appear in blogs read by millions. Or, in this case, blogs written by me and read by a guy named "Ernie" who lives in Pigsknuckle, Maine.

Back to the passage of time.

Today would be an excellent day for me to stop and smell the proverbial roses. Unfortunately, I live in New Hampshire where a rose garden lives about as long as a fruit fly. For those of you unfamiliar with the lifespan of a fruitfly, their existence is about as long as a sneezing fit.

Maybe I'll go smell one of the estimated 1,298 scented Yankee Candles my wife bought in 2008. I think we have one that's called "Fresh Linen" that, according to Internet scuttlebutt, smells eerily similar to the freshly-washed white linen suits that Mark Twain used to wear while thinking up clever homilies about linen or the film Blade Runner, which he wrote the original screenplay.