Now This is a story all about how... wait a minute.

I need to listen to myself more often. How many times have I said that a person should never ever ask how someone is doing, but yet I still do.

I shouldn't ask people how they're doing because I don't actually care. And even if I did care, which I don't, I don't have time to listen. Today I stupidly asked an 89-year-old man how he was doing, and he said, and I will do my best to relay his exactly ramble:

"Well," he started, "I never would have thought it. Never would have thought I would live this long. I'm almost ninety, you know. Everybody asks me. Asks me how I did it." Now, it took the man almost two full minutes to drag that terrible use of the English language out of his mouth-- damn slow-talking old people-- and so at that point I tried to interject some sort of failed segway, asking 'what is the lowest line on the chart', but to no avail. He'd started, and darn it, he was doing to finish. "Well," he continued, "I stayed away from the Whiskey. Never touched the stuff. Other guys did, but not me. I was born in Colorado you know, and I remember, I remember being a boy. 11 years old. And I took a raft and I across the Mississippi river... " ... At this point I realized that his story was starting to sound suspiciously like the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, simultaneously I realized that this man was balls crazy with oldness. He came into the office wearing an over-sized crazy horse belt buckle, and one of those southwestern style turquoise bolo neckties, and a confederate hat that said 'Bush Gardens' in big gold letters across the front-- but only then did it dawn on me he was not in complete control of his mental facilities. So, I put drop in his eyes and that shut him right up.

If I ever get old enough to weave elementary texts into my own history, I hope I end up a Faulkner novel. But I probably wont. I'll probably be the Catcher in the Rye or something. I imagine by the time I'm 89, there will be an actual diagnosis called 'emo dementia', where not only do you have bouts of forgetfulness, but because of years of listening to crying, whining music, patients also experience deep depressions brought on by previous girlfriends they never actually had.