The Wasteland

I've had a birthday semi-recently, which makes me 37. This means I've finally made the crucial life transition from late-mid thirties to early-late thirties. It's a strange sensation to finally be on the other side of the momentous divide I've been staring down for so long. I can say it doesn't feel anything like it did when I crossed the other major social turning points in one's life, like 18 or 21. It's hard to explain what feels so different about it. There's a kind of general tightness, like the icy grip of mortality, squeezing not so tightly as to suffocate, but just enough to remind, constricting not quite to pain but certainly to a vague, numbing tingling. Mostly in the area of my prostate.

Life expectancy is a weird calculation, varying study to study, but I don't think there's any question that now, for any American man born in 1974, I've definitely crested the hill. Like most people who make this realization, all I can really think of are those summers before high school when all I could think of was how excruciatingly bored I always was with nothing whatsoever to do except watch cartoons on black-and-white television and sweat. The television wasn't black-and-white because it was 1950, it was because we were poor, which was kind of the same thing, standard-of-living wise, in the 1980s.

The crux of the memory is the sensation of time standing absolutely fucking still. And to tell you, once again, that I grew up poor. I'm not sure why it ends up being the point of most of the stories I tell. Partially it's because I don't have a lot of stories about growing up not-poor. I notice that I almost always manage to work it in. If I sit and think about it at all, I guess I use it as a kind of a social inoculation. Sure, I can be an asshole in many, many, many other ways, but how can you stay mad at me when you know I went all through junior high school living in a trailer park? Or that, when I did live in a proper neighborhood, it was such a economically disadvantaged area, the only lawns being mowed by Mexicans were their own.

Time no longer stands still, summers be damned. I've got air conditioning and HDTV, which both seem like mistakes now in retrospect. Time absolutely hums as it whips past me. This used to be a stressor, but I'm less afraid of dying that I used to be. I find my level of existential dread comes and goes with what my current relationship status is. I remember toward the end of my marriage, I went through a particularly bleak period of morbidity and fatalism. It turns out that was mostly neurological side effects from the metal filings my ex was sneaking into my scrambled eggs, but that doesn't mean it was all coincidental. Right now things are going pretty well, thanks very much, so I have a more settled sense of completeness. It's an absurd idea, though. I'm not sure how or why it would be easier to face the act of ultimate aloneness in someone else's company. Some people like to point out that we're born alone and die alone, but that's the kind of horseshit false symmetry people always throw over their heads to block out the view of the end. As mammals, birth is something we always do in tandem. But even on a crashing airplane surrounded by a couple of hundred others, every set of eyes closes individually. Unless Jesus is suddenly there, which for me would just be awkward. I would have a philosophical obligation to pretend not to see Him, which I imagine one can only keep up for so long.

Being the age I am, I also finally have the life experience to know that what is now will not always be. I appreciate the moment of satisfaction because I have moments of despair against which I may contrast it. "Contrast" is the right word. The colors shimmer and pop, individually and in concert, an ordered kaleidoscope of stark and subtle, overt and subdued, garish and sublime. It's through this fractured and fracturing lens I can see a little farther into what's coming and a little more clearly what's behind and weather both with letting the swirl affect my balance.

For instance, I know I'd never riot after a hockey game. Hardly an act of perspective there. But I guess in their defense (or in this case, "defence," the suck-ups) they do live in Canada. Hockey season is over and nothing televisable will occur again until the puck drops again in November or whatever it is. Frankly I'm amazed they don't riot every day.