Yesterday

When I was a kid - what, something like around my late teens - I used to think to myself that if I hit thirty-five, that would be a long enough life. Everything afterward was just gravy, you know? And I used to go around believing television and comics and not real life as to what life would bring with it.

Adventure! Heartache! Travel! EXCITEMENT!!!

Of course, growing up, everything is a process and all of these things DO come along. It'd be dismissive to not acknowledge all of it: for one day I was in New York City, for instance, and lived all of it!

The scary things that come with life aren't ever given a face when you're growing up, however, because no matter what you may imagine will come, you're an indestructible piece of flash machinery and unstoppable. Nothing is a monster when you're a kid!

Recently, as ridiculous as it sounds, as I'm reading some really smart, fun, and entertaining books (Richard Kadrey's ALOHA FROM HELL, Chuck Palahniuk's DAMNED, William Gibson's PATTERN RECOGNITION), I appreciate these little stories for what the truth they share...and still glance at them as bullshit. Paradoxically, as I'm reading, I want to scream into the pages that what they're selling isn't real life. Then I think of this quote from Grant Morrison.

I've not been very happy for a bit and what's getting me down aside from the typically mundane things like money woes, debt, work, friends, family, illness, is the lack of excitement I used to have for tomorrow. I used to be excited by the idea of tomorrow. Not in a conceptualized, futurist way (I think), but the very cliche that everything exciting is waiting tomorrow. How's that for cynical: thinking all the excitement's run out in my life.

Think I'm a terrible rut.

Recently, the best friend and I have spent hours talking boys and girls, and even that's lost some luster because it's become routine. It's become daily life. I feel weighed down by everything that's become my universe. Most folk, I think, can appreciate all of these daily trials because there are things to be learned from all of this. I know this too. But this isn't what I signed up for when I was born. Is that terrible?

I don't know.

Home life, work life, personal life, none of it is horrible and obnoxious and sad. Not really. Taking in the bigger picture as it is, I'm pretty damn fortunate. I don't think I appreciate it enough, frankly, and all of these things I think are perhaps a form of selfishness. At work this week, in talking with the boys there about marriage, one of them said that I had passed the point in life where that was something to want. And I wonder as we get older does that keep happening? Like a road trip, is life a long journey and the stops are places off the side of the road that you pass by after you consider stopping and then say to yourself, "There'll be something else up ahead," not considering that perhaps there won't be? Not that I'm regretting ever investing time with someone enough to want to make them my life partner. I don't feel that. But I wonder if all the excitement I used to feel about tomorrow's now an off-ramp that I passed years, weeks, days, hours ago.

Me, nattering like this, is what annoys me the most.

Yesterday, while looking through the company's intranet, I discovered openings at work that aren't necessarily interesting but look like might be fun. Puerto Rico, New York, California. Wishful thinking in a way. Because responsibility isn't easy to slough off, right? And I then make myself upset by conniving ways to make things happen where everyone is happy first and then myself. Which is NOT a way in which to do things in life. I've learned that much.

I think, the work thing notwithstanding, that I'm looking for the fun that I always believed would exist along with the idea of tomorrow. I'm not an old man, not yet, and I'm wondering where all the fun went. My idea of fun.

I turn thirty-five in two months.