Pearl-Diver

I'd never eaten an oyster before tonight. I don't mean that euphemistically, because most of the things that "eating oysters" would be a stand-in for as a euphemism, I've totally done,* I mean the actual physical act of tipping back a half-shell of bivalve in a manner unlikely to produce in it a pearl.

I'm not sure if it's the cliché of the social rebirth after divorce or the banal first stirrings of midlife crisis, but most days I'm astounded by how unastounded I am at the world's ability to keep surprising me. At 39, rest assured, I am entering the period of life marked by an awareness of mounting the fat edge of the ramp leading to slow physical decline and a terse if grumbling impatience with youth culture. But days pass where my lawn is trodden upon by neighborhood kids and it goes totally unmentioned.

And to be fair, some aspects of youth culture are genuinely, objectively stupid. I'd go as far as saying some specific parts of youth culture could stand therapeutic face-kicking. But knowing what "objective" means, I can give myself a pass. There are young-people things I like, such as recycling and the rap music. See, if I really was a crusty old sort, I'd make a joke here about how rap music is pretty much just recycling anyway, but Paul's Boutique was made of mostly leftovers and that shit is art.

OK, maybe citing a 15-year-old album was not the best way for me to establish my cutting-edge urban bona fides. And following that up with Latin legalist phraseology was unhelpful as well. Que sera, etc.

I'm on the quick walk to 40 and my oldest son is about to start high school. Unless romantic comedies are all lies, this is when I'm supposed to start feeling the walls closing in. And the room sinking into the ground and the first shovelfuls of dirt scattering over the roof. And then I buy a bright red 1977 Corvette Stingray, engage in painful incremental flirtation with a shockingly receptive twentysomething barista*** with an eyebrow piercing and probably some kind of related visual impairment over three or four really uncomfortable and poorly written scenes before returning at last--triumphantly by choice!--to my long-suffering wife**** and adorably miscast black-haired children. And we all feel better because we've realized (just in time!) the comforting power of heteronormative monogamy.

Instead of all that, I just feel... I don't know. Uncontainable? Unfettered, in an almost pornographically libertarian sense. As I've learned to understand my circumstances and my future as the cumulative effects of choices, conscious or otherwise, a kind of exalted, anti-Marxian agency is the follow-on, unhinged from history or the buffetting macro-thrum of mechanized structures. So long as there is no wake of destruction behind you, it's possible to keep moving forward, thrashing and swimming about in a perpetual line of lucky goodwill, like a happy shark, the kind people would be pleased to come across. Like with gumdrops for teeth or something.

Not every day is like this, of course. Other days stuff happens where I realize things like I'll be dead before George VII becomes king and all the royal baby hoopla is an international plot to bash me over the head with the weight of my own mortality. On those days maybe I should be played by old Jeff Goldblum. Or maybe Lewis Black.

But most of the time, I'm generous enough to feel like I'd deserve to be played by Paul Rudd. You know, handsome, but not intimidatingly so. Approachable still, right?

And now I'm like: why all the guys playing me gotta be Jewish? One more thing to work on, psyche. But I feel like I've got plenty of time.


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*Eating mussels, eating clams, eating scallops... those are just the first three that pop into my head. Sure there are loads more.**

**Oh! Cunnilingus.

***I'm thinking Anna Kendrick. Or Zac Efron.

****Kate Winslet. Unless she wants too much money, then Marisa Tomei. She seems affordable.