Futons are for Communists.

I’ve noticed something about me since I turned forty nine even though its only been a day.

I feel grumpy.

Like I need to invade a country or slap a Starbucks barista.

Maybe it’s the realization that I’m hitting the “we don’t count” age.

You know what I’m talking about.

You see it on questionnaires or surveys.

“Are you in the following age group? 18 – 25, 25 – 35, 35 – 49, 50 – death.”

I’m heading into that last group.

The group that no one wants to market to.

I’ve never understood that. Advertisers target the younger ages, the 18 – 25 group.

Why?

My groups got all the money.

But what do we get? 100 year old Art Linkletter selling long term health care insurance on the Home Shopping Network at two o’clock in the morning.

You never see an ad for anything that makes people my age “feel fresh”.

Maybe I could go mountain hiking or horseback riding or play tennis too if I just felt fresh.

Did they ever think of that?

“Communist bastards.”

That’s another thing that’s happening to me.

I’m saying things for no reason that my father used to say.

“Only drug addicts and homosexual communists sleep on futons.”

“You don’t know the meaning of the word hunger.”

And I’m saying them to people I don’t even know.

I was in line at Vons yesterday and started a conversation with a guy in front of me I’d never met before in my life.

I could hear myself talking but I had no control over what I was saying. You know, like when you first meet a woman you want to sleep with.

“So you think oranges are a good investment in California? Well you’d be wrong. We’re getting our oranges from Chile. Can you believe it? Chile? It’s a goddamn communist plot that’s what that is. I can’t even get my freshly squeezed from the good old USA I have to get it from Chile? It’s the damn liberal Democrats that’s what it is. Next thing you know we’ll be drinking bottled water from Fiji. Goddamn communists. You know what I’m talking about?”

“Uh… I’m just buying some peanut butter and these pads for my wife.”

“Is that American peanut butter?”

See what I mean.

Not only that but I changed lanes four times yesterday and three of those times I didn’t use my turn signal. The fourth time I used it I forgot to turn it off.

For ten miles.

I’m only forty nine.

What the hell am I going to be like at fifty?

I have this urge to yell at the paperboy.

We don’t even have a paperboy.

We have a little Vietnamese paperman.

I even read the obituaries first today.

I knew two people.

I started talking about them out loud.

I was alone.

This is only my first forty nine year old day!

I have to go.

I have this insatiable thirst to play “bingo” right now.

I want to rerecord my answering message so that it sounds like I can only speak one word every ten seconds.

What is happening to me?

I think I’m having a hot flash?

Matlock’s been canceled?

Communist bastards.