Ulysses S. Grant

Sticking with last week's theme blog-as-immediate-record-of-history, I had intended on writing today about how it feels to be 50, since I've had a birthday at some point in the interim, but then within the hour before I sat down to write this, a former president was convicted of financial felonies related to moving money around to pay to silence a porn star he shtupped back when he was just a disgusting business failure before he became a disgusting political failure. It's fine to report it as happening, but how did someone (me, a 50-year-old white Californian, antipathetic to the figure in question to the point of being genuinely not fash-curious) alive and aware at the time react to it? I mean, he came out and looked sad and low-energy when he gave his obvious and predictably idiotic statement to the press right after, and that'll probably have to be the highlight. He almost certainly won't go to jail and who knows what the percentage likelihood is he'll just have it overturned on appeal for whatever arcane legal reason (it worked for that other known toilet ghost Harvey Weinstein, who only remains in jail because he was such a shitbag, his other convictions stand). If anything, it will only help a presidential campaign built entirely on grievances. "Look what they did, they convicted him just because he did all the things he was accused of. A travesty. Next thing you know they're only going to let people be president who get the most votes."

We can't get distracted by little things like former chief executives being convicted of felonies when there's something way more important to document, like what it feels like to be starting my sixth decade of being improbably, persistently and irresponsibly ALIVE in this period of (a normal amount, if you think about it historically) turmoil and discontent. Here are my major impressions so far:

-My right forearm is strained along the ligaments tied to my ring finger and pinky, after playing tennis last weekend, for the first time in a long time. It's mostly OK unless I try to grip or lift anything at an angle.

-My knees are fine when totally passive, but experience some level of pain pretty much at all times when moving and especially when under load (this is how I'm referring to my own weight these days, "under load).

-I've had another outbreak of the chronic epididymitis I've been dealing with on and off since my early 30s, so there's an urgent care visit in my near (as in: after I'm done here) future.

-But none of the issues are life-threatening or really diminish my overall quality of life. I get around great (if sometimes slightly gingerly, depending on how much gravity I'm feeling at any specific time) and all my organs seem to be functioning in line with manufacturer's specs (apart from the third bulleted point, see above, but that's very treatable).

-Existentially, I feel... weirdly OK. Bordering on good. "Great" could be creditably argued. I've spent the last 40 years or so being paralyzed by the dread of my impending death (I know "impending" is relative, but the finality of it means even 90 years from now, it's still out there, you know, pending). I remember my dad (whose own death stopped impending about nine months ago) saying his 50th birthday really fucked him up, but I seem to be having the opposite reaction. I can't be sure what is causing it, but I don't know if I've ever experience this degree of presence, of gratitude, of the real warmth of living under a benevolent sun on this garden-of-eden planet where there is basically mathematically zero chance anything should exist (see: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn, et al.), but somehow we have starlings and suspension bridges and cold-brew coffee. Maybe I've spent all my allotment of existential self-regard (hahaha, no) or maybe it's just a fluke of everything being so transient these past few months with the new job, the kids moving out, building new relationships, I've accidentally backed into an inflection point of real perspective, however fleeting.

All mythologies track cycles of destruction and renewal, where death and creation purify and justify one another, sometimes personified in gods or myth stories (like a world-ending flood). That's why so many pre-astronomy civilizations tracked time in cycles rather than linearly, learning to count on winter leading to another spring, with more confidence as each transition expressed itself into being; before we went and ruined it with the "science" of solar-based calendars and mathematically calibrated time-keeping, hurtling only ever in one direction, in an arc toward a real finality, with us and our feeble mortality in microcosm of the, you know, whole-ass cosm. They started the literal clock ticking for all of us, which turned out to create a whole new sector of the economy in things like life insurance and bullshit vitamin supplements. But don't worry, I'm not going to let me feeling of contentment turn me into some kind of hippy. The last thing SoCal needs is one more middle-aged white person skimming the Wikipedia articles on Buddhism and walking around letting everyone know "I consider myself spiritual."

I also might be nursing some kind of neurochemical high because I've spent a LOT of money in the last several days, between getting the landscaping done and now on the home office I'm finishing in one of the kids' vacated bedrooms. I don't want to say that being a high-volume consumer makes me feel like a whole person, but I'm an American after all. Maybe this was all it took to keep the demons of morbid obsession and panic at bay. Frankly, at this point, a meth habit might have been less expensive. But let's leave that for now; I want to have some new options to consider for when I turn 60.