Rejoice! We're All Gonna Die And Most Of Us Won't Be Young Or Pretty

For the past two years or so I've been undergoing some morbid grappling with mortality.  Often I am observing a family with children in a restaurant and I will begin to see the children maturing and becoming adults and eventually old and dying after their parents have long since passed on.  Some of this could be triggered by my own identification with the children.  I have vivid memories of my parents taking me to great restaurants -- particularly in New Orleans, and I wonder if anyone then was observing me with the same realization that someday I'd be a man in my fifties rather than a child of five.

Thirty years ago on December 30th my father ceased to be.  It is really difficult to imagine 30 years passing so quickly given that it simply ticked away moment by moment in a steady clip as time always does consistently and without fail.  I think of everything I have done and experienced in that time and it is mind-boggling to me.  It is truly a lifetime ago.  Sometimes I look at life as being comprised of several lifetimes.

There's the lifetime as a baby and a toddler.  I was here and alive but there's nothing much about it I remember.  There was no concern for anything nor was there a concept of time ticking away.  Then as memories started to gel into strings of events another lifetime began.  From about 4 or 5 I became more aware of my environment, learning the meaning of more words, learning how not to choke on hard candy, realizing how much I really disliked church, always looking forward to Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, and a tooth falling out so I would be visited by the tooth fairy.

I don't remember my first day of kindergarten nor would my developing mind have understood the point of it.   I don't recall any sense of anxiety about the new experience or being separated from my parents for a few hours a day.  It was an important first step in learning how to behave and in the development of social skills (and look how THAT turned out!) I suppose.  It was mostly just fun although I have absolutely no recollection of any other children there on a personal friendship level.  It's almost as if they were abstractions.  I was more fascinated by the mentally-challenged woman who was charged with placing out cookies for us to eat.  I remember my towel I would roll out on the floor when it was quiet time and we were to stretch out and shut the fuck up for a few minutes.  I think I enjoyed that part.  Early developmental chillaxing.

The lifetime of being schooled was definitely a kicker.  It is hard for me to fathom how 11 years from first grade to being a high school senior could seem to take so long to pass.  Initially I wasn't even looking ahead to high school graduation.  That might as well have been a century in the future.  Starting out it was just one year at a time.  Getting on the school bus in the morning, writing out ABCs and learning to count and whatever the hell else we did in first grade (for me it was drawing pictures of body parts), and then back on the school bus to come home.  Get up the next morning and repeat.

By the time I was in third or fourth grade the reality was starting to settle in that this was going to be one slow slog getting finished with it.  I can imagine having asked my mother when will I no longer have to go to school.  If she had said after the 12th grade I at least had learned to count the different between 4th and 12th and it seemed like one hell of a duration.  The older I got the longer it seemed.

Finally 9th grade rolled around and this was the home stretch:  four to go.  How in the hell four years could seem to pass so slowly is beyond my comprehension.  (Contrast this with the last four which seem to have flown by in an instant.)  High school was like a lifetime within a lifetime.  

Somewhere in that mix was a realization that I was on the verge of becoming an adult.  Thoughts of leaving home and starting a new life were forming.  Choices of college and fields of study were contemplated as well as career options.

Packing most of my treasured belongings into a car and heading off to college was probably another lifetime.  Four years to be devoted to advanced study seemed as eternal as those four years of high school.  But there was a big difference:  I was now in control of the situation.  I could take those four years and stretch them out to eight if I wanted.  And apparently I wanted.

Fields of study were embarked upon and discarded, swapped out for something else, and discarded again.  But hey, if you stay at it long enough you'll eventually get a degree in something just by default.

I was only 22 years old on December 30, 1982 when I received the phone call from a nurse at the hospital informing me that I needed to come to the hospital.  It never crossed my mind to ask why.  I knew.  This was probably the first major lesson in life I would learn.  When I walked into the hospital room there was this moment of intense clarity that only one other living person was in the room.  That was my mother.  The pile of flesh on the bed was nothing but a corpse.  There was no life in it.  And I will never forget that odd vibe in the room.  The man who had been my father was no more.  That lifeless body was not him.  I didn't know where he was but he wasn't there.

It is startling to me to reflect back on that day as if it happened a month ago and realize just how much time has passed.   I had only recently become the owner of a SONY Betamax video player/recorder.  In order to use it I had to go to a store and buy or rent media.  It would never have occurred to me to take a picture of it to share with friends because that would involve sending off the film to be developed, and then sending photos through the mail to whomever I wanted to see it.  Yeah.

I was very much aware that the future held great promise and that technology would unfold in marvelous ways.  There was already talk about these things called compact discs which would replace vinyl platters and turntables.  (And much, much later there would be talk of replacing compact discs with vinyl records and turntables, but I digress.)

The year 2000 was something I pondered a lot ever since I was a child.  It was thrilling to fantasize about that futuristic world even though I was always aware that I would turn 40 that year.  That fact was disturbing.  It meant I'd be old, and probably too old to enjoy the marvels of the time. 

There was a lot going on with me in the decade of the 80s.  Even at 22 I had no idea what I was going to do with my life, what career I would pursue, whether or not I'd ever find love, or how I was going to cope with this persistent homosexuality lurking in my core.  The following summer after my father died I packed my bags and moved to London.  I never gave a thought to my widowed mother or whether she might need me.  I was being called to my next lifetime.

Living alone on another continent with an ocean between me and my past was exactly what I needed.  I came to terms with being gay.  I scored a lot of music on vinyl and compact disc.  I bought my first truly high-fidelity music system at the age of 24 and little did I know I would still find myself thrilled with it at the age of 52.

In 1985 I was back in the US and decided to wrap up this college education thing.  I was still clueless about what I would do with my life but I at least wanted to put a degree in my pocket.  I didn't care what degree it was.  Finally, in the summer of 1987,  I took my last college course in British history and made one of the very few A grades I'd ever earned.  I was done.   In January of 1988 I was handed a diploma.  On with life, whatever that meant.

That was just a bit over six years after my father's body had been placed in the cold ground on December 31, 1982.  That seemed like a lifetime and the future was as blurry as ever.  For the first time in my life there were no guideposts for me, no benchmarks I could reach for, nor were there any job prospects; there was just me and the wide open future.  Little did I know that another lifetime was right around the corner in less than two years.

I moved to Denver for a year and then moved to San Diego in 1990 where, within a few short weeks of my arrival, I'd meet a man and fall in love.  Then I'd move to Los Angeles in search of some kind of job.  That's where I landed in advertising at the ripe old age of thirty.

This is the point where my concept of time took a bizarre turn.  I no longer seemed to have one.  I felt stable with a secure job and a comfortable relationship.  Had I suddenly "arrived?"

Promotions and pay raises came quickly and I was totally focused on my career.  There were some good upheavals along the way:  buying our first home together, getting a cat, and then within a year or so, selling the house, packing everything up and moving to Austin after buying another house. 

All that dread I had about being 40 in the year 2000 suddenly and abruptly became a reality.  It was one thing being 25 and feeling old because I was at the quarter-century mark, and it was quite another being 40.  It was horrendous for me.  And thrown into that mix was a job layoff which would become a decade of instability.  Job number 2 became job number 3, and then numbers 4, 5 and 6.  And then it was 2010...another decade.  And 50.  50.  If there's anything that can make you feel a fondness for 40 it's 50.

And then came job #7 which wasn't an event out of my control.  It was a choice I made.  I'm not sure whether getting laid off from #7 in January 2012 contributed to my current mentality or whether it's just another element in a big pot of steaming soup called life.  And I suppose that 10 months of unemployment in 2012 probably did me a world of good on one level.  It was the longest break in employment I'd ever had since entering advertising in 1997.  It gave me time to think about life.

If my father dying when I was 22 and my realization that life can leave in an instant was a watershed moment for me, then my studies of Eastern philosophy this year were another.  In all my years of life I had never once stopped to think seriously about the source of life.  Where do babies come from?  Not from a stork, of course.   Men and women have sex and if everything is in good working order, a baby happens.  A spark of life came from somewhere...God, the cosmos, maybe life is just a continuous strand and doesn't really spark or emerge suddenly.  But what I had never contemplated before is that it comes from the earth.  What you eat and drink -- and both of those are pulled from the earth in some capacity -- contribute to forming sperm and eggs, just as they are instrumental in growing your bones, muscles, skin, teeth, and hair.  Something that was once alive, maybe a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, went into the formation of sperm and eggs which then formed another life, and all of it pulled from this earth.

And this earth was pulled and formed in a similar manner (and I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it was considerably longer than 6,000 years ago) by whatever shit was out there drifting around the universe looking for a purpose.  Funny how that happens.

What I find so incredibly frustrating is how I have to stay focused on facts like these to keep from going totally insane about life and death and the crap in between.  I am bitterly angry (and somewhat confused) by how my life has evolved.   I'm not even sure I've been living between 1997 and now.  It just seems like a bunch of shit involving career obsession, what kind of cars to buy, or appliances, gadgets, phones, radios, TVs, pods, pads, computers, wireless mice, sofas, chairs, tables, plants, weather stations, backup drives, cameras, records, CDs, printers, batteries, books, curling stones, shiva lingams, and a fucking shitload of software.

I get frustrated sometimes just looking at people and how they have aged.  It almost seems like some cruel joke.  Sometimes I feel as if I have awakened from a long coma and I simultaneously marvel at the world and curse it. Sometimes it's not even a coma feeling.  I wake up from a nap and I'm not even sure who or where I am.  And then I hear Sheldon snoring in the other room and I'm not sure who he is either even though we have lived together for 20 years.  Is he the same person?  Am I?

 I see photos of people on Facebook -- people I went to school with, or people I've known since I was in my 20s, and I barely recognize them.  Everyone is getting older.  And the older we get the more crap will be thrown at us.  Older people you've known your entire life suddenly start dying off.  Then people your age start dying.  Even a few younger people start dying.  I don't have a clue how I got here or why this is happening.  And that bitter anger serves no purpose either.  I might as well bitch about the weather.  Same difference.

Sometimes I just want to give up.  Sometimes I want to try and recapture two decades which seem lost in a haze of work and devotion to career.  Of course, I can't recapture anything because it's gone.  What's left of it, or what's to come, depending on how you view it, is here.  This is it.  It should be beautiful and right now I harbor contempt for it.

Somewhere along the way I lost my awe of life.  I find myself increasingly disgusted by it.  I'm saddened that we can't stop all the senseless killing and take a break just long enough to come together and have a discussion about how magnificent our world could be if we could just work on our potential.

How, in a life so short, can people be so hung up on themselves, clinging to outdated beliefs, stockpiling weapons, being hell-bent against helping out anyone less fortunate, spending lavishly on shit they won't care about later, or eventually won't be alive to enjoy?

Most people act as if they have no clue how fleeting life is.  They are absorbed in power games and greed.  Are they really the ones in denial or is it just me who is fucked up?

For 2013 I need to figure some of this out and recapture the missing awe.  Because in the time it took me to get a college degree I'll be the same age my father was when he ceased aging.  I don't want to be bitter about it, and I sure as hell don't want to be looking back at 52 wishing I was here again.  That ain't happening.

I try really hard sometimes to be a good Buddhist and live in the moment and only in the moment.  I just can't sustain it for more than...a... moment.  It pisses me off knowing that I could lose track of time again and another 25 years will pass and I'll be 77, if I'm so lucky.

One of the things that grounds me is knowing that in 50 or 60 short years, everyone reading this will either be a dead and distant memory, or about to start banging on death's door.  The latter are the lucky ones who are 20 now and think they are immortal. 

Perhaps this is just a mid-life crisis.  I wouldn't know for sure because I've never had one.  If it is, why can't I be normal about it and just go buy a fucking Porsche?

OK, so who wants a cocktail?  Happy New Year!

Factoids From The Deep

It has to be one of those getting older things that causes you to have these earth-shattering realizations about the passage of time that seem difficult to believe.

In 1950, Ella Fitzgerald released the LP Pure Ella which featured this song.

Just 15 years later, the Beatles released the Rubber Soul album. (I was only 5 years old and they had already released 5 previous albums!)

A scant 15 years later, the Police released their third album, Zenyatta Mondatta. Incidentally, this was also the year John Lennon was murdered.

And now that was 30 years ago.

49.5+

I used to not mind getting older. I remember turning 20 and feeling like a new era had begun because I was no longer a teen, although I enjoyed being a teen. It was as if I had shed some skin.

Turning 30 was another milestone but it didn't impact me negatively at all. I didn't look 30, not did I feel 30. What's to complain about when I still occasionally got carded for buying beer?

Then came 40. That one hit me pretty hard after a decade of still feeling 20-something-ish. It was like going from 29 to 40 overnight. And throughout this decade of 40s, another big number was always on my mind.

October 22 is always a dreaded day because it marks the halfway point between birthdays and on that day this year I became 49.5 which rounds up to 50. I'm not rounding up yet, but when January rolls around, I'll be telling myself I'm 50 even though the official date will still be over four months away.

As I reflect back on nearly a half-century of living I'm astonished at how quickly segments of it passed, as well as how warped some of it seems in retrospect. I often hear about how quickly time passes as you get older, and it does seem that way.

As a child going into my teen years, all I wanted was to be 18 and graduate from high school and begin a life. From 14 to 18 seemed like a lifetime of waiting, studying, and simply trying to pass each class. Four years now certainly doesn't seem like four years then, but of course it's exactly the same.

I remember the thrill of finally going to my first R-rated film. Hearing an actor spew the F-word seemed so naughty and adult. In college I remember my first trip from Fayetteville, Arkansas over to the Oklahoma state line -- a trip of roughly 30 minutes -- to purchase beer. Arkansas' drinking age was 21 while in Oklahoma it was 18.

My years in my 20s were certainly busy. And in theory that would tend to make the years pass in a blur but that was not the case at all. I bounced around from college to college within the University of Arkansas system, from Fayetteville to Little Rock, back to Fayetteville, back to Little Rock, and one semester in Monticello, about 30 miles from my hometown after a botched start to a semester at the University of Denver.

I was clueless about what to do with my life, what I wanted to be when I grew up, and what to study. And I was grappling with being gay and closeted.

In December of 1982 my dad died at a hospital in Little Rock while I happened to be enrolled in college there. I really felt that I was too young to be dealing with the death of a parent at 22. So I put blinders on and tried to get on with my life.

I suppose I really needed to get away on some level emotionally. It was early in 1983 when I signed up for a work abroad program through the university which allowed me to live and work legally in another country for six months. After much deliberation I decided on London. After all, I'd already been there several times using grant money and loans which were supposed to be used for educational purposes.

In the summer of 1983 I left for England, found myself a small but very nice flat in an ideal area of London, and within a couple of weeks had secured a job at the HMV Shop's flagship store. Granted, had I been more mature, it might have made more sense to find something that would give me better pay, a salary on which I might have a chance of making ends meet as well as gaining experience in the business world. But I was a lover of music, an avid collector of LPs, and the HMV was my ideal, especially since I had shopped there on previous visits.

During that six months of working, I became very comfortable with that new and exciting life, far from the rigors of studying for some degree -- any degree, really -- in Arkansas. My co-workers were wonderful and the comfort level around them enabled me to easily come out of the closet which felt so liberating!

I didn't want this experience to end so I began researching ways to extend my stay. Short of getting married (to a British woman), there really wasn't much hope. I was allowed to apply for an extension though, knowing it would ultimately be rejected. It was only a question of how long it would take for someone in the government immigration office to deal with my request. In an era when Commodore computers with 5-inch floppy disks were all the rage, it could have been quite a while.

After a year there, I made a choice to fly back to Arkansas to visit my mother for two weeks. That was a decision which ultimately would seal my fate. Upon reentry into England, the immigration authorities at the airport suspected something after noticing I had been in England far longer than the six-month stamp in my passport. And the fact that I was returning raised all sorts of red flags. I spent the bulk of that exhausting day in a detention center being interrogated.

Ultimately, I was allowed to enter, but with a 3-month stamp and a "no work allowed" status. I gave notice at work, and continued to work those last two weeks while I made plans regarding what to do next. I was there for a total of 14 months. It seemed like a lifetime. I felt British and I felt at home there, and yet I was being cast away.

After a failed attempt at establishing myself in Los Angeles, I returned to Arkansas completely broke and in debt. I enrolled in college again in Little Rock and this time I managed to finish and got a degree in January, 1988, more than nine years after I embarked on that education.

What a life I had lived already. I did more between 17 and 28 than most people could conceive of doing. I had gone from a life on the farm to getting a bachelor's degree and was the first person in my family to do so. And in between I had traveled to Israel and Jordan, multiple trips to England, a summer of studying French on the southern coast of France, with weekend trips to Italy, Spain, and Portugal. I had visited pen pals in Germany & Holland in addition to a trek into Scandinavia to spend a week with a friend in Finland. I had gone skiing in Switzerland.

Not only had I come out of the closet in England, I was starting to work on it in the US. While finishing up the degree in Little Rock, I began meeting people at various jobs I held. I was lured out to clubs where I'd meet more people, and I would be introduced to a gay club and, naturally, a few relationships would happen. None of them amounted to anything, just a fling for a few weeks before the situation dissolved away.

But 1988 was a big year for me. When I look back on that year I'm honestly astonished. Despite being 28 and having had a decade of amazing life experiences, I still had never held a steady job which would support me and pay the rent, and I had only just graduated college. I still felt young because all of life seemed to still be ahead of me. I certainly didn't feel or act 28.

It was in 1988 that I entered a relationship with an 18-year-old -- a relationship which felt right finally. I thought it was love but it turned out to be just another confused kid who was just perhaps a bit more confused than I was considering that he was about to start college and I had just finished.

After that failed attempt at a relationship, I really felt like there was no future for me in Arkansas. My best friend had just moved to Denver and I had stayed behind on account of this so-called love affair. When that crashed, I packed my bags and went to Denver in January, 1989. I got my first real job and started a new life.

Again, what seemed like a very long time was only about 18 months. I'd made new friends in Denver and one of them was planning a move to San Diego. She wasn't keen on making the move alone, and as I was always up for a new adventure, I agreed to move again. In the summer of 1990 I was on the road again, in a U-Haul towing an orange VW Beatle.

I was also up to my old tricks again, behaving like a rich adolescent by taking jobs I wanted to do as opposed to seriously going after employment which would support my lifestyle. I took a job as a cashier at San Diego State University. Almost all the employees were students at the school, and most of them were Dutch, oddly enough. I enjoyed it because it had that international feel which I had so enjoyed by working in London. But it was not sustainable.

Thankfully, in August of 1990, something really amazing happened one night at a club. I met txrad and this time being "in love" actually meant something. It was mutual, and real. And suddenly my life wasn't just about me. I no longer could just pack up and move anywhere on a whim.

I still had the Los Angeles itch dating back to when I left London and chose LA as my next destination and home. So txrad and I agreed that I would move to LA and as soon as I found a "real" job, I'd get an apartment we could afford and he would join me. That's exactly how it played out. By April, 1991 I had achieved my desire of having work and an apartment in Los Angeles, and a partner in love. At the age of 30.99, real life had begun finally.

I'm not sure what it is about approaching 50 which has caused me to reflect back on my life and the concept of time. Three years now seems like a complete and total blur. A couple of cats have died and I've changed jobs a couple of times. Nothing at all like the three years between 1988 and 1991 when I went from being a single horny boy constantly on the move to a man embarking on a career in advertising with a permanent spouse.

My 30s were all about working and living in Los Angeles, getting pay raises and bonuses, and having a dream of buying a house. We did that late in 1995 or early 1996. And we adopted our first cat. Then an opportunity arose here in Austin and we sold our house in LA barely a year after moving in, and we moved to Texas and bought a house. Twelve years have passed and we are still in the same house and loving it. Often I have to pinch myself to believe that I've been with the same man and the same career for 19 years. That's longer than it took me to reach high school graduation from the point of my birth! How did I do it? And what comes next?

One thing is different about approaching 50 than any of the other age markers. There's no longer a feeling of just starting out. I no longer have this concept of a wide open life ahead of me full of possibilities and wonder.

I no longer speak of the "next job." Frankly, I'm happy doing what I do. And it is entirely conceivable I could do it another 10 or 12 years and then retire. The notion that I might never have to update my resume again, or go on a job interview, is pleasurable, but a strange concept with a dark lining.

That experience at 22 of losing my father was just a taste of what was to come decades later. Now I'm no longer "too young" to lose relatives and friends. Along the way I've lost some of both. But now at 50, I'm starting to wonder, is it all about coming to terms with mortality? Is that what 50 means?

My mother is in her mid-80s and has already broken a hip. My brother is in his 60s. I have aunts and uncles in their 70s and 80s. Pretty soon it's going to be a non-stop parade of funerals. Then one day I'm going to wake up and realize it's just me now. There will be no brother, no mother or father or grandparents, just me. And that's if I'm lucky enough to be the last man standing.

Perhaps 50 is a wake-up call to slow down and savor life instead of rushing through it. After all, if I'm shocked that I will have been in a relationship and a steady career for 20 years on my 50th birthday, and amazed that it passed so quickly, the math in projecting the future isn't very appealing. When this short cycle passes again, I will be writing a blog post about the horrors of being 70. And that's rather disturbing. I hope I can at least manage to get the bathrooms cleaned a couple of times between now and then!

It's as if, in my brain, I hit the pause button on aging in 1988 and still think and behave as if I'm 28...which actually means I'm thinking and behaving as if I'm 20! When I stumble across a photo of me from the 80s and 90s, I ask myself, "who WAS that guy?" And when I see a current photo of myself I ask, "who IS that guy?" I just don't see myself as nearly 50 until I see past and current photographs for comparison. Gone are the days when I will go back to college, work in a book store or a record store, buy a youth rail pass in Europe and hang out for nine weeks, have a fling with an 18-year-old, or move from one city to another every year or so. Also gone are the days of sleeping on a futon, but that's a good thing!

I am settled. That realization might indicate the time has come to unpause and hit the fast-forward button to reality. But on second thought, I might put that off until April, 2010. There's no point in rushing into it. That gives me time to work out a couple of kinks before I can cut loose and stick it deep inside.

>>>

play. loud.

Hey, I'm not as old as him!

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work... I want to achieve it through not dying.

-- Woody Allen

As the poet said, 'Only God can make a tree' -- probably because it's so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.

-- Woody Allen (again)

One Toke Over The Line

I probably have an unhealthy infatuation with the International Date Line. I spend too much time contemplating it and trying to wrap my mind around the concept of a fixed imaginary line in which it's always a day later just a step (albeit on water) to the west. I am not alone.

The International Date Line can cause confusion among airline travelers. The most troublesome situation usually occurs with short journeys from west to east. To travel from Tonga to Samoa by air, for example, takes approximately two hours but involves crossing the International Date Line, causing the passenger to arrive the day before they left.

Certainly as the world turns there are moving imaginary lines where once a day it's going to be Thursday in Detroit and Wednesday in Chicago. I have no trouble with that concept.

I think it would be a hoot to get really stoned on some good Jamaican shit and straddle the date line, especially around 11:59 PM as the floating line overlays the static one.

"It's Sunday."
[hops to the left] "No it's Monday."
[hops to the right] "No, Sunday!"
[takes a toke at 12:00] "Oh it IS Monday."
[hops to the left] "Wrong again! It's TUESDAY."

The date line passes between Russia and Alaska through the Bering Strait. So as Sarah Palin might stand there monitoring the goings on with her vile neighbor to the west, I wonder if she's ever considered it to also be staring into the future. Where she would stand it might be Monday. On that big chunk of tundra across the strait, it's Tuesday. She might even see something happening over there on Tuesday which we need to know about in the interests of national security, and give us a day's advance notice, right? We need such a woman in the White House!

It doesn't seem fair to me that the date line is isolated out there in the Pacific. It would be way more fun if we were to move it someplace where more people could interact with it on a regular basis. How about right through the middle of the North American continent?

In fact, it would be hilarious to move it so it divides the Dallas/Ft. Worth airport. That would give added excitement to air travel.

Travelers entering DFW from the north onto the south-bound roadway and destined for a terminal on the east side of the airport would say, "Oh hell. We just missed our flight by 23 hours. But if we hurry and loop around we can still catch it."

Wouldn't that just be a scream?





Seriously, have I nothing better to do with my time?

Let's Do The Time Warp Again

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately. Being unemployed seems to encourage that rather nasty activity. I start thinking about age and time. And I usually have some disturbing realizations.

I remember when I turned 20. I was a tad upset because it was the end of my teen years, but I was also excited because in another year I'd turn 21 and could buy booze, a decision I'd regret a few decades later.

When I turned 25 I recall being a bit depressed because I was a quarter of a century old. It sounded ancient. But I was young and wasn't sure I was even aware of how young I really was. My eyes were focused on 30 and I dreaded it. I wanted to milk the life out of my 20s before my youth would magically vanish a few years down the road. And I had no concept of life in my 40s or beyond. I knew it was out there somewhere but so very distant as to not be worth pondering.

As 30 gradually rolled around, it wasn't as bad as I expected it to be. Not bad at all. I didn't feel much different than when I was 25. I didn't look much different. I would still frequently get carded for purchases of booze which I had been legally purchasing for 9 years. I might have been 30 but if nobody knew it, that was as good as still being 20.

The ease of turning 30 was probably helped tremendously by the fact that I met txrad that year. Being happy does wonders for negating the impact of age. Little did I know that falling in love AND falling into a career all at once tends to accelerate time. It's as if I'd spent my entire life on the slow incline of the world's wildest roller coaster and now I was approaching the crest. On that incline you have the ability to relax (somewhat) look out at the landscape as you climb ever higher and it is as if time has momentarily frozen. Big excitement lies ahead but for the moment life is tranquil aside from the clickity-clacking reminder of things to come.

And then the descent.

During my 30s I was so self-absorbed with work and the excitement of moving from a generic apartment filled with singles into a nicer older apartment where real couples lived, and finally into our first house, I was scarcely aware that six years were passing in what seems now like an instant.

And it hardly seems possible that I was only 37 when we moved into our second home here in Austin. And you could say this was about the time the roller coaster entered a series of exciting but gut-wrenching loops. Six advertising agencies later, here I sit in the same house, about to turn 48, unemployed, stressed-out, depressed, filled with anxiety and contradicting desires and emotions, and wondering what the hell it's all about.

Hitting 40 was not fun. Let me emphasize that. Aside from transitioning between jobs that year, I came to the realization there was now an entire decade between me and those beloved carefree 20s. Aside from two clearly memorable incidents -- living through the Northridge earthquake in 1994 and moving to Austin in 1997 -- that decade is blurry, and I often wonder what I have to show for it.

Somewhere along the way during all of this, my mother who has always seemed young and independent, went from her healthy 60s to being 84 and recovering from a broken hip. And yesterday, my father would have turned 86 had he not died at the age of 60. This is all very hard for me to fathom. I rarely get to visit with my mother, usually driving up for about 2 days once every 14 months or so. Each time I visit she always remarks that it's as if I only just left, then here I am again, and we pick up where we left off. I agree with that assessment but it's a strange thing and I don't understand it.

Here I sit, obsessing about the future, wondering if I'll handle turning 50 as easily as I turned 30 or whether it will be even worse than turning 40. One thing is certain: it seems like a pivotal time; a crucial moment to maximize every minute of a decade which will inevitably lead to the age of 60. But I can't seem to visualize that any more than I could my 40s when I was 25. But the excitement of this roller coaster in the post-double loop phase is both a relief and a disappointment. I just hope there are a few more exciting and unexpected twists and turns rather than a long and slow straight shot back to the point where I boarded. I am 47, and despite all I've said in this post, my mind still feels 20, if not by body.

Reflecting upon the years and and extending it to include the lives of my parents is even more startling. My father was born in 1922. In that year, having electricity in your home was a relatively new phenomenon. A majority of people in rural areas didn't even have it. Automobiles had only started rolling off assembly lines less than 10 years earlier. Portable radios were invented in 1922. William Howard Taft was president of the U.S. Taft was born in 1857 before the civil war even started.
(While I'm 48 it is entirely possible the president will have been born in 1961. I'll be older than President Obama.)

The electric guitar was invented in 1923. But stereo phonograph records were still a decade away. That is worth noting.

By the time my dad was my current age, it was 1969. The Rolling Stones were playing their infamous Altamont concert where a fan was stabbed to death by the Hells Angels. That summer Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, Canned Heat, Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, the Who, and a few dozen more bands were playing to half a million people at Woodstock amid a haze or marijuana smoke and LSD-tripping hippies. I was 9 years old.

Gee, and I thought a lot had transpired in my lifetime. I often wonder if my parents ever sat around and analyzed the years of their life as I'm doing now, or were they too busy raising a brat to notice how much had changed. I suspect they did think about it, and often.

And I think perhaps I resent the fact that my parents lived through so much more startling change and contrasts than I can perceive in my own life. I know they didn't think 1969 was a good thing. However, part of me would trade my life for one in which I had been born in 1922 and was 47 in 1969. And I'd be 86 today.

For some very odd reason, that seems a lot less scary than turning 50 in 2010.

Crossposted at Big Brass Blog

Monday Is The First Day Of My Week

Having been raised in a Christian family, Sundays always had special significance as the day of worship and rest from work. "Six days shalt thou labour" was something drilled into my head from childhood. Back in the 60s and 70s, I recall my mother being very uncomfortable going into a store on Sunday to buy something.

Being a rebel at an early age, it should come as no surprise that I used to question why so many people had Saturdays off from work. Not that I would complain later in life when I moved into the workforce. But it did serve to reinforce my belief that many religious people pick and choose the scripture to which they adhere while dismissing those which are deemed inconvenient as if religion was akin to ordering à la carte from a menu.

I never understood the logic of Sundays being referred to as the first day of the week while simultaneously referred to often as the 7th day . Why should the weekend be broken in half? kona needs things logical and simple.

I guess it was a natural that I would eventually become employed in some aspect of the heathen television broadcasting industry which uses a very un-Judeo-Christian broadcast calendar in which every week starts on a Monday, and the vast majority of months begin in the last week of the prior month.

Those of us using the standard broadcast calendar are in a world of our own. 2008 begins on December 31st this year. December began on November 26. And Sunday didn't turn into Monday at midnight this morning. It was still Sunday when I woke up at 5:45, but it was Monday by the time the coffee finished brewing a few minutes after 6:00.

Nice and simple.

1982

My God! That was 25 years ago!

txrad has a movie on, and I asked him what it was. He hit the info button and I saw the year and I just had this revelation.

Time flies when you're having fun.

Question of the Day: What was going on in your life in 1982?

I was 4 years out of high school... hard enough to believe that. And my dad was still alive, for about 3 more months.

Bill Clinton was about to defeat Frank White to win back the governor's mansion in Little Rock.

And even then I think I knew Hillary wanted to be president.

And I was listening to the Talking Heads, the Ramones, Gang of Four, Buzzcocks, Siouxsie and the Banshees.

I guess it was a pretty good year. Probably the last of the really good 80s years in America.