"How Terribly Strange.....

...to be 70", is the rest of that Paul Simon lyric. I had no idea.

I completed my 70th year on Earth last November. Well, at least my 67th or 68th. I can't remember much of the first couple of years. I have to take the word of others (and some suspect hospital documents) that I actually started here and not in some off-world colony or long-range spacecraft. Being a life long devotee of all forms of science fiction, I have thought about that from time to time. It's put me off looking into my DNA ancestry.

Species certification notwithstanding, living in today's world as a budding septuagenarian feels alien enough for anything to be true. So I'm keeping an open mind on the issue, while I assess the evidence. Let's consider.

First, something simple. Cars. I understand science and engineering. Seat belts, air bags, side view mirrors, infant car seats, even rear view cameras. All are improvements that have emerged in my driving lifetime. I accept them all as reasonable and smart. But self-stopping, self-parking, even self-driving cars? Right. That's nuts.

I'm barreling down I-75 surrounded by 18-wheelers of all sorts, bus-sized RVs towing Mini Coopers, pickups longer than a cigarette boat with tires off an earth mover, and I'm going to turn back to my "in-flight" Scrabble game and calmly make my next move? I don't think so. I've spent too many miles dodging highway nemeses of all types and sizes to trust some computer chip made of plastic and tin foil to safely usher me and my loved ones from the Motor City to Disney World. This without so much as a touch screen or a joystick. I've seen Star Trek, Jupiter Ascending, even Guardians of the Galaxy. There has to be some alien conspiracy at work here.

Then there's communication. During my formative years (ages five through 29), communication referred to learning cursive, knowing how to diagram sentences, syntax, avoiding dangling participles, and rules of punctuation. Later, we had to adjust to the intrusive notion that what we mean to say is more important than getting the grammar right. So rules went out the window. We were schooled in transactional analysis and interpreting body language and packed off to sensitivity training.

In more recent years we have devolved completely into cyber babble, mostly concerned with how fast we can connect with the largest number of people possible, with no thought or meaning required.  Actually weighing down a "message" with thought or meaning is usually counterproductive. The important thing is not to exceed the number of allowable characters. This downward spiral feels very much like what a hostile force might lead us to as a prelude to invasion. Keep your eyes on the horizon.

And what about dignity? Nothing appears more strange (and less dignified) to me than a professional business man in an expensive suit who appears to have forgotten to shave during his morning toilette. I'm not talking about well-groomed beards. They have been around and accepted since, well, forever. I'm referring to what looks like yesterday's leftovers. Scraggle. Stubble.

I understand that a whole generation of young men missed razor training and are beyond redemption. But this trend has spread to older, formerly distinguished cultural leaders (like TV weathermen, game show hosts and used car salesmen). What I think is really going on is that the aliens that are replacing key individuals on our planet have a fierce allergy to after shave lotion. So I now carry a travel-size bottle of Aqua Velva with me at all times. Just in case.

Safety seems to be another obvious indicator that we have been infiltrated by off-worldly strangeness. Doesn't it seem weird that almost every child rearing principle, device, toy, and dietary rule of the previous generation is now either not recommended, disapproved by some extremist consumer protection group (like Pediatricians for a Wimpy America) or actually illegal. I have a basement full of baby stuff I have hoarded for years so I could pass it all on to my grandchildren or use these memory-laden items to entertain the little darlings during grandpa babysitting adventures. I don't think so.

Most of the equipment that arrives with my grandkids when they visit has more safety features than my first car. Actually, my first several cars. Who could have known that twirl-a-whirls, collapsible walking trainers, child leashes and even umbrollers were such lethal threats to the future of the species. More likely, the spawn being cultivated to replace us have some physical deficiencies (no doubt an evolutionary balance to their mental superiority) that require this crackdown on faux-irresponsible parenting.

If all this isn't enough to persuade you that the strange walk among us, let me indulge in a brief glimpse into the worlds of politics and religion. I mean, duh. Have you followed the news lately? Or surfed through the political talk shows or evangelical stations? Chaos. Cacophony. Cosmic discord is upon us.

Have we ever seen so many contradictory points of view advocated so intensely, explained so meaninglessly, defended so self-servingly, and embraced so blindly by its constituencies? It's like we are caught in an anti-intellectual big-bang, with every idea flying away from every other idea at the speed of light. A speed so fast that no thought will ever catch up to or influence any other thought. Who else but a race of menacing superbeings would have the means and the will to shut down the critical thinking processes of so many humans at the same time? You've read Stephen King's Cell, right? I'm tellin' ya'. 
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Or not. It could be that I just got a bad bottle of vitamin chewies. Or that I have mixed up some of my meds with my mother's. Or that the gravitational pull of the lunar apogee is messing with the sensory receptors in my brain. Or maybe, just maybe, I've allowed my addictions to Perry Mason, Leave It to Beaver and 50s sci-fi to color my sense of normal. You know. Like a Twilight Zone episode (from the early years). Not sure.

Whatever the cause, I am feeling a lot of strangeness up here in the septo-sphere. It's not exactly scary. I have no urge to run and hide under a table. But I sense something wafting all around me. Something unnerving, with a faint aroma of distilled spirits. And I have a feeling that it's not going away.

Until my next encounter of the 70s kind.

Grosse Pointe Charles