What are you looking at? Don’t be coy, I saw you taking sidelong glances at the intricate lines around my eyes. Or maybe you were just considering waxen skin and wondering if I’m still alive at all.

Go away, boy, you bother me.

Forgive my bellicosity. It’s just that five days into January and my new year is already shot. I’ve been doing the math, you see. Good things never come from math.

It works like this.

There’s a new police officer on the Lewiston force who is 24-years-old. That’s not so young, really. At 24, a fellow is old enough to buy liquor, have kids, own a house, get depressed over a 401(k), etc. All that happy grown-up stuff. The dude is an adult, just like me.

That’s when I started adding, subtracting and performing other functions on the calculator I got free with a fill up at the gas station. I hit the +, I stabbed the – and even jabbed at the % thingamajig, though I don’t really know what it does.

I carried the four, moved the decimal and added seasoning to taste. An hour and a half later, when the results were in, the numbers displayed on the screen were chilling, like the revelation at the end of a M. Night movie.

Seven. The number was seven. That’s how old this rookie cop would have been when I started this glorious career at the newspaper.

While I was out drinking with sources in bars, skulking around emergency rooms and filing stories on deadline, the cop in question was a pint-sized booger-flicker still learning to write his name in cursive.

While I was sitting through court hearings and filling out W-2 forms, he was carrying a lunch box to school and whining “Aw, mom!” whenever he was told to go to bed.

While I was bouncing checks and begging for loans, that cop was probably wrestling with the idea that Santa Claus may not exist.

There’s nothing like this kind of mathematical perspective to bring home how damn old you really are. It’s like dating a girl who doesn’t remember when the space shuttle blew up. Or like realizing that kids born in 1989 are legally old enough to drink.

What were YOU doing in 1989? Shopping for a hair replacement system? Getting your prostate probed? A baby that was brought into the world, all pink and shriveled at that time, can now kick your butt at arm wrestling in a bar.

How does that make you feel? Like a dinosaur who needs to work on his forearms, right?

My second year or so at the paper, I was dating a girl who wanted to make plans for the millennium. Celebrate the arrival of 2000 on an island or something.

She wanted to make reservations right away. I wanted her to hush so I could watch the OJ trail. Marcia Clark’s hair was particularly splendorous that day.

Girlfriend: “A lot of hotels and such are going to fill up fast.”

Me: “It’s a long ways off.”

Girlfriend: “It will be here before you know it.”

Me: “There is absolutely no way OJ is getting out of this mess.”

That lack of foresight and imagination may be part of the reason why that girl is now living in New York with three kids born to another man.

The year 2000. In the mid-’90s, it seemed like some make-believe thing, too far off to bring into focus. Time, back then, moved like a glacier through the dark waters of my life.

Now the millennium is more than a decade old. I lose track of how far gone it is. The horrors of Sept. 11 seem like something that just happened. But all of that is more than nine years behind us, too. I look at photographs of myself from that era and I don’t have the lines around the eyes. I look all fresh and alight with hope.

Dumbass.

And if the fact that TIME FLIES isn’t enough to grapple with, there’s my own unintentional reaction to my place in it. Why, just the other day I found myself waxing on about how kids these days have it so easy, with their internets and iPods and Wikipedia. Back in my day, we had to go to the library and pick up a dictionary. If we wanted to listen to music on the go, we had to hoist 200 pound boom boxes onto our shoulders.

A kid who was born the year I started at the newspaper does not remember a time before the Internet. That alone makes me feel the claws of mortality brushing against my cheek. THE FUTURE I so flippantly dismissed back in the day is suddenly here and somehow, I don’t feel like I was ready for it.

So, I suppose now the only rational thing left to do is to go racing about downtown Lewiston on my motorcycle. If I keep it up long enough, chances are good I’ll get pulled over by the 24-year-old whippersnapper cop.

“Sonny,” I’ll screech at him in my best indignant-old-guy-voice, “I was working downtown Lewiston before you were old enough to walk to school on your own. I was here when Birch Street went all the way through to Lisbon Street. I was drinking at The Cage while you were still pooping in your diaper. Run along now, boy. You bother me.”

I tell you, nothing makes you feel young again like the jolt of a police Taser.