Too Long; Didn't Read

Every single blogpost I've ever written, up until today, I've been in my 30s. I started my first foray into what was is now a passé medium dominated by ad-bots and old people afraid of the breakneck pace of the Facebook almost 10 years ago, just a few months past my 30th birthday. Those were the halcyon days of flip phones, easy mortgages and the Cheneyist Perma-War, all things that brought us so much comfort and pleasure and, luckily, never ever let us down.

It is with some... kind of emotion that I'm announcing that today I've decided to try something completely new: writing blogposts while not in my 30s. Don't misunderstand, it's not like I'm doing other things while still in my 30s but just rolling this post-30s thing out as some kind of literary pilot program for you, the Loyal Readership. It happens all the time now. Everywhere I go, no matter how fast I run or how much I hyperventilate, I remain persistently, stubbornly 40.

I can't really say it snuck up on me. I've been equipped to predict it since I mastered the concept of the tens place. As the day approached, I was trapped in this sort of emotional vortex of unknowing, between what I was actually feeling and what I'd been led to expect by Judd Apatow movies. Without Paul Rudd to play my lovably socially inappropriate best pal, though, I was kind of on my own.

I'm supposed to be on the brink of a Grand Realignment of Priorities wherein I suddenly decide the choices I'd made in my 20s and 30s were a trap and now I should attempt to outrun death in a bright orange muscle car or to fight it off by trying to siphon the life force out of the vaginas of women in their 20s. But I can't really afford the insurance on a muscle car and as women in their 20s, if I have to ever in my life have to have a non-ironic conversation abour Robert Pattinson, I think I'd prefer not to live. It's not worth the risk.

I'm not going to lie and tell you that I revved through the odometer tick-over without some wallowing in a pit of crushing self-awareness bordering on Satrean nausea. But I was a little worried that it didn't hit me harder. What I mean is I'm only slightly bummed out that I'm finally chronologically the age I've been atitudinally since I was about 13. That was the age I discovered hot tea and anglophilia, nonfiction books and the soul-stroking joy of a high-quality pair of socks. A lot of my stories end at about 9:30, 10 pm tops.

But if that sounds like regret, it isn't really. I've lived a fairly cautious and safe life, but it was all done consciously and with an almost fetishistic adherence to responsibility for the choice at the time the choice/s was/were made. But look, I did chaos througout my childhood, when I wasn't on the list of those being polled in the decision-making process. If you live in enough houses made of straw and sticks, you figure out eventually that the future is all in bricks, without really worrying about how labor-intensive they might be.

It's also hard to have a full-blown midlife crisis if you've achieved most of the things you set out to achieve. This isn't me about to brag about a laundry list of accomplishments,* I just think it's important to set the bar... well, not low exactly, but at a height you could maybe reach with your fingertips if you had to snatch down your bar and make a run for it in a hurry. I've got a steady-ish job. I own my house, all by my big-boy self. I've been paid to write things. I've seen a lady naked. See, most of the big stuff I've knocked out.

From a weirdly young age, what I wanted was a family, and I have that. There was a divorce in the middle there somewhere, but the kids are still here and I've added a girlfriend and her kid besides. So the divorce was convenient, otherwise that last part would have been a lot more stressful than it is now.

I'm supposed to be entering into that period of my relationship with my kids now that I should expect the conflict and drama inherent in the processes of testosterone overproduction and burgeoning independence. Kids are supposed to learn to be themselves by first testing out the ways they are specifically not like their parents, especially the same-gendered one. But somehow... I don't know, it's been pretty easy. Sure, it helps that we have a strict No Feelings rule where attempted open and honest exchanges about our emotional states are punished along an escalating scale from ridicule to pepper spray.

But it also helps that in 2014, among GenXers and their kids, there's less of a discernible generation gap. Maybe it's just the cynical PG-13-ing of popular culture, but we get excited about the same movies, the same music, the same video games... The new iPhones always come out at the exact same time for all of us. I'm leaving myself open, though, to be surprised and horrified at the way they're abusing some kind of social media or technological whosits we oldies just don't get, man. For their sake I almost hope that exists.

At the risk of the unforgiveable sins of earnestness and sincerity, one thing I've come to feel more and more in the decade I've been doing this for myself and, to a greatly lesser extent, for you, I've learend my story has value. Not the type of value you can exchange for a liveable fucking sum of money apparently, but getting things down that I would have dismissed as trite or banal or worthlessly self-indulgent I've found has a kind of intrinsic value in exposure alone. The reason I continue to write blogposts is because I've seen, over and over and over again, that the act of offering has rewarded the reader (me) a tiny glimmer of... something, whether it's base or titillating or prurient or more profoundly touching, insightful, entertaining or just regular human. What I've developed, I guess, is the blind, slightly egomaniacal faith sometimes--not always, but sometimes--some part of this great volume of bullshit might catch one of you somewhere at the right time to mean something. Even if it's just something funny, for a moment.**



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*Note as an example that I'm still writing this, here, for you, free of charge.

**Christ, is this how it's going to be? Old people are fucking maudlin. No wonder they die.