It's been more than a year since the Hibiscus blog, so I thought it was about time to weigh in.
Fortunately my blogspot didn't disappear, but it did decide to switch to html mode. I was confronted by a foreign language--Code Gibberish. When I panicked, a clever friend suggested I google the problem and lo! with a couple of easy manoeuvres all the posts reappeared in unscathed English.
Today, while waiting for my Peugeot to have a couple of old parts replaced at the garage, I thought of autumn outside, and then about time passing, and then with time passing the inexorable fact of ageing.
Armed with a blank Note on my iphone and a single finger I tapped out
The Seven Ages of Wrinkled*
Baby Wrinkled: occasionally at birth, but inconsequential, and doesn't last.
Otherwise: plump folds of flesh, usually concealed in gender-designated disposable diapers and cutesy clothes.
Adolescent Wrinkled: Acne City. In fact this is not about wrinkles, it’s about volcanic eruptions ruining your life, self-image compromised. Desire for invisibility often defines this stage.
Early Wrinkled: which, let’s face it, is not wrinkled: simply a gentle fold of thirty-something years, gathering before the onslaught. Here we are talking enhancement rather than pulling, stretching and ironing out wrinkles. It's the age of early corrections: lips plumped, cheeks enhanced, nose bobbed and whatever other obsession ruins your daily meditation.
Early Middle-Wrinkled concerns those in the vicinity of 50 years. Promises of wrinkles to come along with a not-so-subtle shift of hormones. You stop smoking, you make health pledges. Some friends have already embarked on the long, repetitive path of surgical and chemical improvement.
Middle Wrinkled (when 65 is the new fifty): seriously considering having work done but not doing anything besides applying outrageously priced cream made from someone's placenta. Plus royal jelly, collagen, hyaluronic acid, retinol, forgotten herbal extracts, et j'en passe.
Asking oneself is it too late to lift? Is one too lazy to do Botox? Too afraid to inject foreign uplifting substances?
Late Middle-Wrinkled (when 78 is the new 77): every wrinkle now has a home: the neck, the cheeks, the forehead, the vertical grooves on sides of mouth.... and one's eyes are sinking back into turtled eyelids-- such indignities!
And one doesn't immediately recognize the person staring back at you from the morning mirror.
Who? Oh yeah….
Late Wrinkled: OK, we're not there yet, so won't try documenting it.
But truth be told I’ll be grateful to get there.
I say fuck the wrinkles!
* with apologies to my Shakespeare friends