Lordy, Lordy...

So, among other recent tragedies, I turned forty yesterday. I spent the entire day, from around seven-thirty a.m. to ten-thirty p.m., immersed in school work. I’m wondering if this isn’t a precursor to the rest of my forties, head buried in a book until my back is so hunched over that it takes a weight-lifting orderly named Sven or Helga to wrench me back into the upright position. I can see some lowly undergrad who has lost his way in a labyrinthine university library, wandering around the stacks of ancient Eucrustian texts and finding me, or what’s left of me, a cobwebbed and bleached skeleton, surrounded by history books and scholarly articles about the postmodern significance of air when applied to the poetry of Walt Whitman. My last written words may be: “Need to find a vending machine, must eat a Snickers now…”

Although my day was busy, I was able to allow myself one gift from myself. This is going to sound like a chapter from “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff,” (and I usually am unable to do these emotionally disciplined, easier said than done, tasks meant to simplify your life) but yesterday I needed something to keep me from going into shock. So I decided that I was giving myself a day free from worry, stress, internalization of other’s worries, self-consciousness, self-criticism, painful memories, obsessions, and other mentally distracting baggage. The amazing thing to me is that, at the end of the day, I was able to pull this off. I must have had help from higher sources because it was just the type of day that all of that baggage would have been following me around like ungainly, whiney muskrats. But it was also only for that day, because at around midnight, just like Cinderella, my carriage of carefree karma turned into a giant, immovable, pumpkin.

I don’t really want to reflect too much on what it means to be forty. Why? Because I don’t really know what it means to be forty. I’m waiting for a mid-life-crisis, but then again, if I am going through a mid-life-crisis already I probably wouldn’t know it. I haven’t bought a sports car or anything. I do realize that the older I get, the more my writing resembles Andy Rooney’s. That could definitely bring on a mid-life-crisis.

Most of my posts are about past events in my life, and I am realizing two things about this process. One is that the events I write about represent little benchmarks in my life, and that in reflecting on them I am able to understand that I have lived a relatively unscathed existence thus far—let us all give a heavy knock on pre-treated, waterproof particle board! The other is that my memory is fading, and that when I make declarations about my writing that include two parts, by the time I get to the second part, I’ve forgotten what it is. My sister Emily swears that when I was a kid I had the most amazing collection of die-cast WWII airplanes imaginable, but I have no recollection of this. This is so frustrating because I want that memory. I remember the matchbox cars—Norman Hill gave them to me when he went off to eighth-grade or something, and when he asked to see them later I only had about five left to show him because the rest were lost around the house, basement or yard—but this memory will not do. Like a child, I am covetous of memories of toys, and the idea that I can’t remember the coolest ones (although Emily may be misremembering as well) is a minor, yet persistent, distraction.

This all comes on top of the realization that my writing is usually about two things. Let’s see if I can get to the second one without forgetting what it is. Nope, couldn’t even get to the first one. No really, I remember. I write about myself and things I’ve had, material possessions for the most part. Why? I don’t know. It seems to be the only way I can be honest, or feel that I am being honest. Myself, and things I’ve owned, seem to be the only thing I can write about with any authority right now, and I can’t seem to find truth by going straight at it, with a “let’s look at religion,” or “let’s look at what the philosophers say,” approach. Not entirely anyway. Being a reluctant egotist, or maybe a closet narcissist, I try to find meaning through my own experiences. If we are to “live in the moment” to find happiness, then isn’t it okay to spend some time revisiting that place where you were in the moment and the moment was in you, and exploring what it means? Or what it didn’t mean for that matter? Or what you thought it meant then, and what it means to you now?

Yea, I’m forty. And if I am not experiencing a mid-life-crisis I believe that I am doing what’s normal for a guy( I’m tempted to write man—but not yet) my age, looking back and seeing if my life has meant anything thus far. I don’t think I’ll ever know, but I don’t think I’ll ever stop trying either. I’m going to make my next post about being in a play in the fifth grade. I want to go there for some reason, and I know I can make it funny—hell, it was funny. I hope I can do justice to the occasion; I’m not quite ready to buy my memory a walker yet.


Post Script: I’m going to do a post one day about the semi-colon. It is my punctuation nemesis. Out of the dozens of papers I’ve written for school, I’ve never used it correctly. Never. Professors either take one out or put one in. One of my life goals is to master it.