In Praise of Older, Better, and Definitely Wiser

It's my birthday. OH, YEAH. Love me!

I'm 33 and better for it in every conceivable way. I know who I am more than ever before, know I'm equipped to handle nearly any adversity more than ever before, and I appreciate the days that are mine more than I ever have before.

Age isn't the enemy. It's a good thing. Forty's the new 30, and people at 50 look better than we'd ever have imagined when I was growing up.

I've known some pretty amazing people in my time, but one of the coolest ones taught me that age was a matter of the heart a long, long time ago.

When I was 13, we were paid $50 to spend the day helping one of my mom's real estate clients move into her new townhouse. Mrs. Chapel was 82 then and had just gotten her blackbelt in karate. She was signing up for a skydiving lesson at the time.

I remember when my mother died and a customer of mine from the bookstoke I once worked at, an incredibly great contributor to the Beat Generation, poet and professor Robin Blaser, asked me how old she was when she passed. I said 57. He looked at me, shook his head, and simply said, "That's too fucking young. Too fucking young."

Even if I die at her age, I've still got a quarter of a century in my favour. I'm 33 and I've grown up in that perfect point of time where I'm old enough to remember the way shit was before technology grew a head of its own, and young enough to understand how fucking cool technology is today.

A couple funny things say exactly how old I am. I was talking to some kind about six or seven years ago, and explaining how great I was at making mix tapes. "Mix tapes?" Fucking kid had never had a tape in his life. Not long after that, I was riding the bus when a couple stupid teenaged girls were yammering about music. "Oh, I heard the COOLEST new band last night! They're called the Doors! They're gonna be HUGE, just HUGE!"

Yeah, with some fucking smelling salts and a Ouija board, sweetcakes.

I'm "old" now. I don't pay attention to the new music, I'm just like anyone "older and wiser," I'm sure that good music stopped being invented somewhere around year 2000. Please, don't burst my bubble. I don't want to discover I'm not as hip as I think I am.

But THIS is my day. And it's Friday. And I have a three-day weekend. And and and. Love me. :) Say hi! I'll be doing a lot of writing in the coming days. I feel it bubbling up in me, like a pot coming to boil. It's almost there now. Stay tuned!

33 rocks. Rocks and rocks and rocks! Fuck numbers. I'm young at heart.