I Can See Your House From Here - Archives
vol 2 number 15
This is all about coming full circle. Not A Perfect Circle -- too heavy, dour, potentially depressing right now. I'm thinking, as Catchy Hooks magazine says, "Melodic Progressive rock that fans of Queensryche and Sacred Warrior will enjoy for sure!"
This is coming full circle in a thirty year spin cycle. Right now, it is Monday, October 29, and the countdown to my 30th birthday sits at just under 5 days, 12 hours. It's got me thinking a lot about age, about accomplishment, about maps and ceramic gargoyles and large quantities of vodka... and that's just the first thirty years. I can only go forward from here.
I got horribly hung up on turning thirty about six months ago. I'm not where I want to be, I thought; haven't done what I should have by now. As I get closer and closer, though, that feeling fades. Sure, I still make the jokes (this Saturday night's gathering of friends and family is not a birthday party but instead a wake for my youth; I figure it'll better excuse the heavy drinking), but that's more a desperate cry for attention and expensive gifts. Thirty, after all, is just another year, some random goon's classification of time passing. Will I wake up Sunday morning and feel older? I doubt it. Didn't happen when I turned 16, or 21, or 29. Just another day, so it goes, so they say...
I struggle with social perception, and it's a sometimes brutal fight. On some levels, it's apparent to anyone who listens to my jokes in an unchecked forum that I could care less what people think. My wife would say that it shows in the way I dress. I decided long ago, though, never to walk in anyone's shadow.
If I fail, if I succeed, at least I'll have my dignity...
Do you see how the signs of aging creep up on you?
No matter how comfortable I am in my own skin -- and I am, no doubt about it -- I still tend to measure my successes based on the yardsticks I perceive around me. It takes a lot of effort to realize that I'm doing okay; I may not have the things that my friends and neighbors have, but the picture's just as fuzzy from the other side of the window.
In the twilight days of my twenties, it's easier and easier to accept things as they are. No, I don't make as much money as I always imagined I would, but most of me wants money to not be so important, so that's mostly okay. I haven't recorded a disc full of music that has seen national release, but on the flip side, I have played guitar on a nationally released CD. I haven't sold a screenplay, but I've finished one, and I'm damned proud of it.
Age is so largely meaningless in the overall scheme of things. I'm starting to see that now. Really, once you've got the legal right to get so drunk you act sixteen, what more do you have to really celebrate? You might say, if you're an American male, 25, because that's the moment that you are free of the fear of being drafted; I chose instead to remain a student until well past that age, just to make sure. Some people say that they're just happy to have made it through another year -- if that's the mindset, I'm going to start throwing parties every night just before bedtime.
I don't mind so much hearing people worry and fret over the birthday that is approaching like a bullet train. It's understandable; you get started down the path of introspection, and the only way to stop is a good three day bender that ends up four states away from where you began. What irritates me is people that refuse to acknowledge their age -- why does anyone feel like they're fooling people with the "anniversary of my twenty-first birthday" line? Come on, ladies: your obsession with the Gregorian calendar is just making the crow's feet grow that much faster.
Myself, I like being thirty. Sure, it's harder to stay awake long enough to do everything that I want to do, and two hours of sleep a night stopped working about three years ago. It's all about the payoff, though. Being thirty means there's one more year's worht of people that I can scoff at based purely on their youth. Being thirty means that long hair, tattoos, and heavy metal music should be one more year in my past, but aren't. Being thirty means that I'm that much closer to Nabokov heaven (my friend Daniel says he wants to be a horny eighteen-year-old billionaire when he grows up. Screw that -- I want to be a horny fifty-four year old billionaire.).
These are only a few of the things at the top of my list.
The things that I do aren't affected by my age. I still have plenty of time to get my computer science degree, to sell a screenplay and see it in 70mm glory with Dolby 6.1 surround, to hear one of my songs on the radio, to write a comic book, to make large sums of money doing little or no work, to hang glide. Being thirty or thirteen makes none of this any more or less possible; if anything, thirty gives me a little more incentive, and a better perspective on what's really important. I have a job that doesn't suck, a roof over my head, the best family, friends, and wife that I could have hoped for, and a lot of drive.
And speaking of important, and full circle: wrestling's on! Whoo hoo!
What? I just told you age is meaningless.
Old columnists never die, because too many people would like that.
(Postscript: This column was inspired by the excellent essay " Bollocks on Birthdays " by Paul T. Riddell. Paul is one of two people whose columns I find entertaining enough to read unquestioned -- he's also one of those funny types. Go read his stuff. There's a website full of it, and I mean that in the nicest way possible.
Paul -- I want my venison sorbet now...
The full circle notion started because, as I realized, Paul uses my name in vain at the end of said essay, in the Addenda section. I mention him at the end of mine, in the postscript. I think that's so cool.)