To help demonstrate how old I am, let me tell you a story about the old days. When I was an undergraduate at the Kansas City Art Institute (go Fightin’ Surrealists! God is Dead!), one of our first assignments as graphic design hopefuls was to slice up a quote from noted designer Jan Tschichold (he’s noted, no, really, he is) and rearrange the letters to spell out the quote in an interesting or compelling manner. To accomplish this, we were to use our trusty X-acto knives (fun fact, I still have limited sensitivity in my right middle finger due to endless hours spent cutting paper and card stock with my X-Acto knife) to cut up the words and letters and, because none of us could afford (or even knew how) to use the photostat machine, we would place these sliced masterpieces on the photocopier to make our final artworks.

We were being graded on not only our creativity, but also on our tidiness of execution, because, after all, we were designers—we were also evaluated on our ability to pull off a turtleneck—something that I, sadly was never able to accomplish. The key to a good final product was ensuring that you had a clean copy from the photocopier—you didn’t want to show a “copy of a copy”, so to speak, because the crispness of the artwork became muddier with each pass of the copier. The best results always came from the artwork closest to the original.

Why do I mention all of this? Firstly, I am still mad about my final turtleneck grade, and secondly, the human body in many ways is akin to a big, squishy photocopier. Each day, inside our bodies, cells are reproducing themselves. Some cells, such as those lining our guts, as very short-lived. Others, such as those found inside our brain, last for lifetime, but taken on average, the cells in an adult’s body are anywhere from 7 to 10 years old, with the cells inside our brains staunchly staying put.

It would stand to reason that this cellular reproduction is great, because you get a whole new body every 10 years or so. But there’s a catch; just as the sharpness of the photocopies I generated in my turtleneck became muddier with each copy made; the cells in our body also “lose contrast” as they are copied over and over again. Simply put, we are all lower resolution reproductions of original source material—we’re all just sloppy Xeroxes.

This is probably the point in this log where I should tell you to not worry and that not all hope is lost, but that would be unrealistic from a physiological sense, as eventually all hope gets lost, the only thing we can do is cope with it—and to do this I recommend riding a bike—and beer, I would also definitely recommend beer.