Lee Majors, the Bionic Man

or, How My Life Has Come Full Circle

My back is in pretty poor shape, hence the conspicuous lack of posts over the past few months.

One of the current issues I deal with, and have for many months now, is that my back pain will wake me up at 2-4am most nights. And with the kind of pain I have, there's no going back to sleep.

So I have consequently been getting to see all the eye candy offered for sale on late night infomercials.

But the other morning, I saw a commercial - a regular one, not a 30min infomercial - that had Lee Majors on it.

When I was a boy, in about 6th or 7th grade, around 1974 or so, the TV show The Six Million Dollar Man came on.

I totally dug the whole NASA/Space Program stuff as a kid, so a show about a former astronaut that is nearly killed in a crash, who is rebuilt with "bionic" parts that make him able to run along with cars at highway speeds, and an artificial eye that allowed him to zoom in on distant bad guys sans binoculars was pretty much tailor made for this guy when he was young.

Later, there was a "Bionic Woman" who was similarly pieced back together with a few different but complementary bionic parts than was Steve Austin.

He had the bionic eye, she had the bionic ear; get my drift?

So the other late, late night, or early, early morning, take your pick, what did my eyes see but a commercial starring none other than Lee Majors. The Bionic Man hero of my youth.

What was Steve Austin, astronaut, on a commercial for?

Well, ol' Lee Majors has gotten kinda old.

Now I'm no longer a spry young lad either, I'm 48 with a really bad back, so me and Mr. Majors could sit and compare ailments I'm sure.

So I was sitting there waiting for my pain medicine to kick in and ol' Lee starts to tell me about...

The Lee Majors Bionic Hearing Aid!

The Lee Majors Rechargeable Bionic Hearing Aid combines digital hearing aid technology with the ultra convenience of a rechargeable battery, so you can enjoy noticeable, digital quality hearing improvement without the hassles of traditional battery-operated hearing aids.

Which is basically a rechargeable, non-prescription hearing aid for us no-longer-faster-than-a-corvette type broken-down humans.

Now I've had tinnitus all of my life. As a kid I remember at quiet moments sitting and listening to the high-pitched whistle in my ears. Then working for years around jet airplanes at DFW and ATL airports only added to the problem. Now, at middle age, I'm getting the normal hearing loss on top of the tinnitus.

But even at the age of 48, there's ol' Lee Majors, still trying to be my hero by offering to sell me a bionic ear to help me better hear his commercial with.

And I thought, man, life has come full circle for me.

Lee Majors gets to be a hero to me in my youth, and then many years late to be my loss-of-hearing savior in my steadily less well heard middle age.

What's next, over the counter Bionic Knee Replacements for when my knees give out?

It's hard to grow old enough to find out your heroes have gotten old and sad enough to hawk hearing aids on late-night TV.

And also, since the Bionic Woman was the one with the bionic ear, shouldn't it have been the aged, but still lovely, Lindsay Wagner who was trying to sell me on a hearing aid at 3am?