During the course of my day I encounter dozens of women. Their ages range anywhere from eighteen to eighty-eight. Most of the ladies I meet are polite enough and as pleasant as one could expect, but the foremost notable element of their manner is that the younger the lady, the more often I am looked upon as if I were some sort of science experiment gone awry—a blue fungus running amok over a piece of stale bread.

Now I’m not foolish enough to expect that a pretty young lady is likely to swoon at my presence, I’m okay with the fact that they don’t. What bothers me is that some of them won’t even acknowledge me with more than an annoyed glare even after I have offered a friendly, totally innocent greeting. Most of the ones that do look at me do so as if I am the stranger with candy that their mothers have warned them about. Some even give me a wider path than is necessary. Do they think that I’m going to tie them up and throw them into the trunk of my car?

This experience has got me to thinking; do young ladies, or gentlemen for that matter not realize that they are going to grow old? Do they think that they will always be a “hottie”? I was what may have been considered a hottie at one time and I bet most of you were as well. In our youth did we look at older folks of the opposite sex as if they were bugs in a jar? Okay to look at, even if it is with a sense of repulsion but under no circumstance desirable to touch?

I believe that if I could go back to the time when I was twenty-years-old, knowing what I know now, I’d be trying to hook up with an older, or more experienced woman. I’d also try not to be such an overeager sex monkey like I surely was and most young men are. Lovemaking was only good in our youth because it was new and we didn’t know it could get much, much better with practice and experience. I imagine making love was also better for men that it was for women—the fellas always seemed to have a happy ending.

So from now on when some nubile young lass looks at me as if I were a praying mantis being held captive in a pickle jar, I’m going to rotate my compounded eyes, rub my spiny front legs together and warn the little lady that if she gets too close I’m liable to eat her. I might even suggest that she will enjoy it.