In my youth, and this is verifiable by signed affidavits, I looked not unlike a young William Shatner. As I aged, I went through a brief Bruce Willis stage, before entering an era when I bore an unmistakable resemblance to Jack Nicholson in The Shining, particularly the scene where he sticks his head through a busted door with a "Here's Johnny!" The likeness was especially striking when I first woke up and stood before the bathroom mirror with saggy eyes and that stuff that forms at the corners of your mouth when you sleep. Or at any rate, it forms at the corners of my mouth.
Now I seem to be entering a new phase, a phase that makes me yearn to look once more like a deranged Jack Nicholson. The bags that were formerly under my eyes have actually migrated down my head to form under my jaw. I cannot even explain how this is possible. Strange tendons I have never noticed before have begun appearing on my neck. Also my neck has begun to form wrinkles; how can a neck have wrinkles? As my hair continues to vanish, it exposes a fleshy terrain that - suffice to say my skull is not the unbroken smoothness of a billiard ball but more the cratered contour of a golf ball, a golf ball that at some point in its history became semi-liquid and then was subjected to a strong headwind. Spots have appeared on the backs of my hands. My feet look like... I will spare you that last image. Some of you may not have eaten breakfast yet.
So what new movie star do I resemble? It's not exactly certain yet because the metamorphosis is not complete, but I think I can say with relative assurance it's something from Star Wars. Narrowing it down still further, it's from one of the first three movies. It's not Chewbacca (Is that the right spelling? Could it be that his name is actually the Deepstep word for chewing tobacco?) although a certain unwonted hirsuteness in my ears, nostrils, and eyebrows suggests otherwise, and - since Star Wars was not filmed in Smell-O-Vision, we have no way of knowing how Chewbacca smelled, I suspect a certain kinship in various odors lately associated with my bodily functions.
No, I'm pretty sure it's not Chewbacca, and can only pray it's the wise but backward-talking Yoda and not, as I begin to suspect, the gelatinous Jabba the Hutt. Maybe this won't be as bad as I think. Clearly Jabba had "let himself go." Perhaps there were other Hutts not as grotesque as Jabba, and maybe I'll end up looking like one of them.
Meanwhile I scan the barroom scene from the first Star Wars, looking for clues, and then I look in the mirror for further developments.
Time will tell.
