Dirty Thirty.
“Thirty -- the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.”
As a good friend promised, it really wasn't a difficult thing to do after all -- at least not physically difficult. I woke up one morning and it had already happened. I didn't die in my sleep, my face didn't suddenly become a web of wrinkles. I had turned thirty, and there was nothing I could do about it.
As you probably didn't notice because no one reads this blog anyway, the gap between the last post and this was there for a very good reason. That last post could serve as a slight hint at that reason -- I went a bit nuts. Now, going a bit nuts for someone who's already a bit nuts means I was getting close to the "squirrel poo" category of nuts, which is the category just before republicanism (bat shit). In other words, you're welcome.
Turning 30 (or turning anything else) is, like most other things per John Green's The Fault In Our Stars, a side-effect of dying. That light across the bay still calls but doesn't seem any closer. Yes, I'm mixing my references. But of course that's the scary part, isn't it? Not the dying, necessarily -- that thought, while well understood, still has an abstract quality that mitigates the fear. Instead, the effect of death is that we have a typically unknowable and hopelessly finite amount of time to live.
Rereading Gatsby has had such a different effect on me than it did almost 20 years ago. I now have a past, for one -- things to look back on that didn't quite happen as hoped. And dreams remain unrealized. They seem simultaneously impossible, little lights at the other end of a huge span of water, and possible, with tools literally in hand to reach them.
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
