The loathing of age.
A short birthday thought... or perhaps a lack thereof. In the words of one of my mentors, "...Guess I'm still writin'."
First an update…
There’s a lot happening right now in the old churning word machine. Rest assured a few big and interesting things are going to pop out of this Substack in the coming weeks and months. As I get better(…at least I assume I’m getting better) I find it easier to write larger and more complicated pieces, and as there is only so much time in the week when your raising two babies with your wife and working for an evil healthcare conglomerate, output will wane. A few larger projects may appear as serials, to be hopefully turned into novels later.
Also Its my birthday.
When does one truly age? To be completely honest I think I’ve finally hit a mark in my own timeline. That mark is a desire to just do nothing for a moment, and not worry incessantly about everything for perhaps a few hours. When my wife asked me “what I wanted to do for my birthday,” my answer was quick enough that I surprised even myself.
“Fuckin’ nothin’.”
I felt bad afterward for appearing curt(Sorry, Dear.), but still, that’s really all I wanted. Just a break. We get some breaks often enough in the microfarmhouse. Its something different, though, to make a conscious decision of it and refuse to move or think for about two or three hours.
As you get older and you build the fort walls higher and higher, the stakes get higher along with them. To the younger self, problems can pile up, bills can go unpaid, messes accumulate, and its not much of a concern because you have all the time and energy in the world to solve even the complicated problems. You affect no one, the rolling stone gathers no moss and all that… the shit you roll over, well, just don’t go back that way again and you wont have to worry about it.
I’m at the point now where the things pile up. These worries are important. They affect the well being of my household and those in it. There’s no forgetting about them. Most of them. Maybe not a huge amount. Maybe the majority is just things that don’t even matter that much but staring at them gives me anxiety?
What do I hope to do with my birthday time, you ask? In my birthday reprieve Probably just worry about something else I haven’t had the chance to worry about in a while. The kids have a phrase now… “stacks on stacks.” I think when they say it they mean cash money. When I hear it I think about the things I have to take care of. Out Of all things that I own I have a staggering surplus of those, ranging in a wide scale from almost totally impossible and too expensive to so numerous and banal I can't count. I have quite a mental list. At one far end, there’s something like, “make enough money to start thinking about getting the roof replaced” and at the other end is, “wipe the dust off my bedside table.” Mixed in the middle are nice things like, “eat enough, but not too much, you fatty,” and, “put birdseed in the feeder so you don’t look like white trash with an empty bird feeder for half the year.” There’s also the situationally appropriate, “Write something, so you maybe you don’t have to retire in the burning hellscape that is the healthcare industry.”
I just have to remember that I’ve made it pretty far along, and at this point I can handle it even if it takes me a while. A break would be nice though… so I could worry about something else for a bit, maybe I could put a toilet in…