FUNNY, THAT 39
(Original Image by Lan Gao)
Don’t know what I’m doing here. Wanted to get some words down to feel the blood pumping in my fingertips, in my soul, if only for a moment. In two days, I’ll be 39 years old. Funny, that 39. It’s one away from 40, the year most of us make our grand entrance into middle age. Funny, I always thought there’d be some wisdom attached to it, or maybe I felt entitled, as though by simply surviving I was owed something from the universe.
Truth is, I don’t have much to say. Most of my moves have been flawed in some way: from dropping out of high school, to drinking enough for several lifetimes, to leaving the film industry for the steady factory job my father handed to me on a silver platter. I have sores on my arms, my brain, my soul. I don’t know why, but I’ve repelled most confidants, and I swing wildly between manic hubris and suicidal depression. I suppose the only wisdom I have gleaned from the first half of my life — much like you use a butter knife to scrape away the crud accumulating in some crevice on the kitchen counter — is that this feeling, this spiritual war of attrition will never end. The players may come and go, but the game and its gravitas remain the same.
There is no solution beyond acceptance, no reprieve besides death. That initial thrust into the mechanism of society was enough to tangle you in the cogs and stretch you to an unrecognizable state. And yet, we turn again and again, sometimes desperate to hold on. That security, that illusion of security, we need it just like the illusion of friendship or love or justice. When you start poking around at the foundation of your basic beliefs, you begin to find cockroaches. And when there’s one, there’s a thousand unseen.
Our concepts have long since died at the advent of puberty. Our hopes are mere carrots guiding us down the narrow mountain path. Our dreams are cock teases of the daytime while we suck the tits of a boss, a company, a society that loathes us.
The best way forward, I’ve found, is to set up a manageable routine around the bullshit and work towards something you care for. You may never get there. In fact, it’s safe to say you will never get there. None of us are truly special with the exception of a few dozen throughout time. Furthermore, it’s important to note that you’ll lose a hell of a lot of people along the way, either through jealousy, apathy, or an inexplicable drifting that leaves you wondering for a lifetime.
I’m going to be 39, and this is the best I can do. My wife and son are the only good things to show for my decades of stupid struggle. But, I’m not pessimistic about the second half, believe it or not, just realistic. All my childhood enthusiasm and fantasizing has been brought down to size. There is no glory, no accolades beyond the superficial. There’s just the routine, the work, and the gamble necessary to rise out of the humdrum from time to time. All the rest is a survival trip, killing time until time kills you.
