As you age, your mind fills up with things wrong with your body. Things to watch, things to remember, things to keep an eye out for. Things to fix, but maybe they can't be fixed. Things to try to endure. Slowly, "getting to know yourself" turns into a long list, a body map, in fact, of fractures, pains, dysfunctions, weaknesses, fears. Your mouth is not a mouth, it's a topography of chips and dents and ulcer-prone spots and odd what's-thats and places food gets stuck and festers until you floss.

That's just a mouth, and barely half of one. It goes on and on, and you hope it keeps going on, but it keeps getting worse, and you wonder why you would hope for that descent to endure. You take it near infinity and imagine a football field, a mountain, a moon, a planetoid of proprioceptive and other defects, all compounding, all gelling into habit, yes, I remember that, and that, and that, I know how to mitigate those pains well enough for now, and here come more, and more. Do you see? You become an architecture of lonely perils, of "character" up the wazoo.