CHICAGO–Following a series of failed attempts to hook up on a dating app, a man discovers an uncomfortable fact about self. The local man, a Donovan Ellis, discovered that he is, in fact, no longer a young man. Ellis, 32, is an artist who resides in the Boy’s Town area of Chicago. He discovered that he no longer qualified as young via a series of unsuccessful attempts at hook-ups.

“I would just be talking to these guys and nothing they said I could understand. Oh sure, I knew what the words were, but the references from when we were kids. I don’t even remember. And them, they had no real knowledge of the classics; you know, like, that the Simpsons used to be good.”

Ellis will be forced through the next few months and years to come to the realization that his time on this earth is forever shortening and that his youth was a time long ago, thoroughly embraced and enjoyed, but gone, and that his future is ever rushing forward at a pace that seems ever-accelerating.

“It’s just wild, ya know?” he asked himself as he looked in the mirror, seeing but not really responding to a gray hair sprouting at his temple. Ellis is financially stable, relatively attractive, and intelligent; his art has won accolades throughout the community and he is, by the account of most of his exes, quite a catch. But still, one problem remains: time inevitably passes and makes wretches of us all, if we let it. “But it turns out I am also old. I don’t regret anything I’ve done. But what a way to find out.”

He logged onto his retirement fund account site and started worrying.

“I thought I had a couple more years,” he said, finally reaching up and tightening a few deepening wrinkles which he had ignored successfully for the past six years.