When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

-Shakespeare, Sonnet LXXII

Thankfully, it has passed. As some of my readership is aware, I had an intense, but short-lived, pre-midlife crisis. For the time being, catastrophe has been averted.

In what is probably one of the best (though undocumented) authentications of the existence wormholes or other temporal disruptions in the space-time continuum, I by-passed an entire three decades of life and woke up about 55 years of age yesterday morning. My hair seemed noticeably thinner on top, my stomach adopted a convex curvature, my skin lost some elasticity--as though a reverse-botox procedure had been performed whilst I slept.

This metamorphosis was, to say the least, unsettling. I had gone to bed Tom Welling, and woke up something more akin to Tom Arnold. Frantic, I turned to Alvin for consolation and advice.

"Alvin, I've aged 30 years overnight!" I began. Raving madness such as this should have prompted Alvin to hang up immediately, but perhaps he wanted to see where this was going. "You could actually plot the ever-increasing rate at which I'm aging--PLOT IT!--on Excel! Having plotted it, you could extrapolate that in exactly two and a half weeks, I will have transformed into a saggy skinned, bi-focaled, balding, wheel-chair bound exemplar of age! I'd be like daikon, with glasses. DAIKON!"

At this point, my delirium had reached a fevered pitch; words erupted out of my mouth in rapid, vociferous succession. I was barely even thinking...a polluted stream of consciousness spewed forth, and poor Alvin's ears were being contaminated. I continued, "I'm being catapulted--CATAPULTED--through time at the speed of light. THE SPEED OF LIGHT!! Alvin, it's not even supposed to be scientifically possible to attain the speed of light, but here I am wizzing right along into my not-so-golden years!"

"Did you know that scientists can now slow light to..." Alvin tried to interject. But it was no use. My hysteria was not to be impeded.

"It's like when you're driving through an area with which you're vaguely familiar, and then all of a sudden--you're lost! And you don't know how you got lost, but you're sure that you're lost. You don't know where you made the wrong turn, but now you're in the wrong place. That's me! How did I get so old? Where did I make the wrong turn?!? But there was no wrong turn! It's a one way street to soft foods and prostate check ups."

At this point, poor Alvin couldn't escape; the best he could do was hunker down and wait patiently for the storm to pass. "There was no wrong turn! But how did I miss the signs? THE SIGNS! How did I miss them? They were everywhere! EVERYWHERE..."

I continued for a while, bemoaning the decrepitude of my body. Alvin said he'd pick me up and drive me to Pam's house for a study party. The following morning I awoke to find that just as easily as it had come, my delusion had absconded into the night.