If the human body is a temple, as some clean-living optimists would have us believe, then it’s more like the imploding, booby-trapped one in Raiders of the Lost Ark than King Solomon’s long-standing tabernacle in Jerusalem. The deterioration of this quickly-crumbling vessel is painful and often embarrassing, as John Dolan points out in his chilling yet uproarious guide to aging in the Russian alt-weekly The eXile. The article is divided into four stages of aging–or decaying, depending on your penchant for the macabre–to maximize user friendliness. That way, you can quickly reference where on the spectrum your earthly husk falls, from “tetraplegic feces-factory” to “senile living corpse spew[ing] up pea soup like an aged Linda Blair.”
