Replaced by a Stranger

My recent fascination with images has me winding my way through hundreds, no, make that thousands of thumbnails in the huge cache of bitmaps and jpegs on the Photobucket site. Still relatively new to all this, I am always impressed with the new image counter. It is in the billions and always increasing.

I use their internal search engine with an arbitrary key word to begin some viewing pleasure. This morning I chose "mirror". 33,000 plus images were quickly made available. 33,000! The things folks waste time on. Taking a picture of themselves in a mirror has to rate a gold star for stupid narcissism.

But there you have it. No one is more impressed with themselves than themselves. And I noticed that if 10 pictures popped up, the majority were females engaged in some way in front of the mirror. Mirrors seem to be more gender specific than other basic self-gratification tools.

The mirror is a two edged sword. It can be used to pump us up or to let us down. I always hope on those rare occaisions when I peak at myself, that I will spot some magical improvement or positive change. And while I feel like the same guy who started out 55 years ago, I have been taken over by someone else who does not look a bit like me. It is a stranger looking back now.

I never used to bulge there. And that never sagged as much as that. What's up with the larger face anyway? And come on, that was always bigger than that, even when it was cold.

No, someone else inhabits my body now. Same mind, but different appendages. A kind of "Body Snatcher" scenario in reverse. Instead of snatching minds, they give us their throwaway bods and take our virulent young physical beings for themselves.