Voyage of the Harrier

There is one activity so clearly meant for Ancients, so perfectly tailored to their physical capabilities, so cleverly designed to preserve and enhance their vitality that it is bewildering that few, so very few, ever discover it.

It is an activity that has as its prime precondition the slow and unconscious absorption of experience. It is an activity that enlivens the muscles as it oils the joints. It lengthens, preserves and justifies life. It throws the practitioner among the beautiful and adoring young. It confers an inviolable mantle of authority and allows you to wear a cute hat.

It takes you to faraway places, unreachable by jet by your richer and more moribund contemporaries. It tempts your taste buds with exotic offerings and disallows constipation by scaring the shit out of you. It fills your ancient eyes with new wonder. It contradicts the cynics and negates the naysayers. It is the way a man, especially an old guy, should live. And perhaps best of all, you may, if you choose (and why not?) use it to wallow luxuriously in the soothing mud hole of the world´s envy.

When the alarms and excursions of your life are over, when your kids are doctors and your wives have found better things to do, when your enemies have had their comeuppances and your friends all bore you, when obituaries prove interesting and when the prospect of earning even one more dollar appals, then the moment has come to look about for a boat in which to sail around the world. There simply ain´t nothing else worth doing.

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