I Turn 50
I turned 50 this past week. 50 amounts to a pretty major milestone in my book. Jimi Hendrix, Janice Joplin and John F Kennedy all died before they turned 50. In other words, despite their talent, passion and brilliance, in the field of survival, the prime directive of all life on Earth, I am more successful than any of them. Thankfully, I never experimented with heroin, and politics just makes me puke.
I actually feel pretty good about turning 50, mostly because I still feel pretty good. Everything still works, and I’m actually getting pretty good at being me. Not that I have any competition for the position, but after half a century, its nice to actually start to get a handle on it.
Sure I’m fatter and balder than I was at thirty, but looks were never my strong suit. Today, I look around and see lots of folks who had further to fall in that regard, who have fallen further than I have in the onslaught of the ages. So, compared to people my own age, I’m no uglier than I ever was, and I’ve grown comfortable with my appearance.
Of course, every year we get a new crop of unbelievably hot young people, and every year the rest of us become sexually less relevant. I’m comfortable with that, but I’m also very thankful that I am still sexually relevant to someone, who is extremely sexually relevant to me.
I don’t wish I were young again. I don’t envy young people. I worry about young people. I feel sorry for young people. We’ve really failed them. They deserve a better culture. They deserve better parents. They deserve oceans full of fish, forests full of wild animals, and a way of life that doesn’t systematically exploit and exterminate them all.
Yes, young people deserve better, but I’ve managed to have a pretty good time here, despite it all, and I think I can keep laughing my way through it for a little while longer. Now it looks like the whole damn planet is falling apart faster than I am. So, I imagine that I’ll die at just about the point that life gets so bad on planet Earth, that the living start to envy the dead, which seems like pretty good timing to me.
