Turning 40

On Sunday I will turn 40, and while that number doesn't particularly scare me, the fact that I'm the same age my father was when I was 17 kind of does. What the hell have I been doing with my time? I should have kicked a two-pack a day cigarette habit by now (and I haven't even started smoking!), I should have a whiny kid preparing for college and another making her way through high school and still asking me to help with her math homework (daughters are cool) , I should be bitter and divorced, reluctantly paying alimony, I should be a Republican, but all I have is ME and my own whinyness and existential angst. What am I waiting for? People who believe in Intelligent Design (ironically some of the stupidest people on the planet) must be right about something, because if they really believe that tripe they're peddling, then they never had a neck ache that lasted three years, or a bum knee or a wrinkle or any other physical ailment. I guess prayer and belief is keeping them young. For the rest of us there's only one recourse: bitching on our blogs.

One thing I really hate about turning 40 is realizing that I'm not going to live forever. You might be thinking that I should have figured that out by now, but that's because you're cruel and removed from reality and it's giving you pleasure to mock my sad naivete. Cut me some slack, I'm a dreamer. So anyway, it's hit me: death is coming, and pretty soon. 40 years have slipped by and any day now it could happen -- hit by a bus, struck by lightning, battered to death by Condi Rice. And if I may wax philosophical for just one moment: that sucks.

Actually, what sucks more than my impending demise is aging. After all, once I'm dead, I'm dead, and then who am I to complain? I don't even exist. But I do exist now (or so my horoscope implies), and it sucks that I have TMJ (Temporomandibular joint disease, most likely caused by too much crankiness), an aching hip, GERD (Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease, also caused by too much crankiness), deteriorating hearing and a growing desire to move to Florida to cash in on early bird specials. I remember like it was yesterday the halcyon days when I could digest a McDonald's hamburger and ambulate without a walker, when TV network experts desperately wondered what kind of shows would entertain me and when I was the youngest member of my softball team. I remember when I didn't really know what it felt like to be tired: it would just get kinda late and so I would go to bed (you can only plot to destroy Microsoft for so long). Now I can't remember what it feels like to feel rested. I remember when looking in the mirror meant falling in love all over again with my pristine image (sorry, Lacan): oh, you're so beautiful, and isn't it great you're going to live forever, so just take your time figuring out your life, don't bother making any decisions... Alas, I've broken all the mirrors in my home and even though I did it deliberately to keep my friend Alec, who's a vampire, from freaking out, it's still nice I don't have to look upon the ravages of time with despair, nostalgia and the feeling that any moment I should dash to the store for a 10 pack of Depends.

Where's my grace, you ask? Where's the wisdom accumulated from years of introspection, trial and error? Where's the regret turned into intelligence and inner calm? It's no where to be found. What do I look like, the Dali Lama? Or Regis Philbon? Okay, so maybe I'm a bit wiser, a bit calmer, but it'd still be nice to be able to eat a gigantic, sickening hot fudge sundae and then fall down for a four hour nap. Ahh, youth.

It also sucks that young women now call me sir. What's worse, most of them, the young ones, seem like alien species to me. People in their twenties, in general, with their desperate manicness, their obession with pop culture, are like people from a B-Movie, something that might be called "American Graffiti" or "Citizen Kane" or "Look at Me, I'm young and scared and stupid, what's life really mean?" Jesus, chill out kids. What could be causing all this angst? Is it the decay of values? Sure, it is. And I don't mean those simplistic values like religion and family, because those are just for kids anyway. I mean, America is just so AMERICA -- obsessed with glory and money, all at the expense of thought. What ever happened to thinking? To reading, to conversation, to communication? You can't talk to any of these damned kids anymore without filtering out a thousand "likes" and "and then she saids." It's all surface and gloss, all TV and desperation.

Makes me cranky.

Maybe I'm cranky because I'm 40 or 40 because I'm cranky. I'm not sure, but I do know this: you know that episode of Green Acres where the rooster refuses to crow? Like, it just cracks me up.