We all live under any number of illusions.

Given our 'technological age', we tend to think that we've mastered our own biology: that we can 'earn back' youthful years spent on frivilous drinking and smoking by eating well when we grow up; that we can recoup those losses we accrued in our foolish days with smoking and drinking by spending decades of our adult lives adhereing (sp? FU) to diets and nutrition guides, taking vitamins and working out. I don't know if it's a youth thing, or an American thing, or just a modern thing. Fact of the matter is, your biology does not hold in escrow those dietary transgressions of years past, waiting for you to settle up your tab. What you've smoked and drank has been set in stone. Your physiology has been impacted or even become accustomed to it; and one day it will sag, bellow, and break under that weight.

In the end, there's no free lunch. There's no free drinks, there's no free drugs, there's no free anygoddamnthing. We all pay. And mostly, we pay the most because we think we can fool it because Lance beat cancer. Let me tell your ass how much it cost Lance to beat nut cancer. Cost him his wife, his children; the only thing that fucker had left was the Tour de France and he even had to go find himself a girlfriend. We all pay. Granted, maybe those diets and supplements and rigorous training regimens will extend our life. But at what cost? So we can have a collection of yellow shirts? So we can just start rebuilding a new life and leave our old one behind? Reinvention of that caliber isn't reinvention at all. It's substitution, escapism.

Fuck that.

I'd rather die a used up carcass with a happy family than some fucking lab rat with pretty-colored jersies.

I'm not saying "REPENT!" either. I'm saying, face the gravity of the habits you form. Love 'em or leave 'em; but you'll never be able to erase them.