According to Douglas Adams, 42  is the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything.

It’s also the age at which Elvis Presley died alone in his bathroom, a sad, bloated caricature of the awesome force of nature he’d been a mere two decades earlier. Don’t panic indeed.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, but it’s okay. I’m not particularly upset about my birthday this year, in spite of that thing about Elvis. Not like I was for my 40th, anyway, or even my 41st last year. I guess I’m resigned to being officially middle-aged now; to borrow a line from my main man Rick, it is what it is. But even though I may be coming to terms with the 40-pluses, I can’t imagine I’ll ever really enjoy my birthdays again, the way I used to in my teens and twenties. There’s just too much baggage now, too many disappointments and regrets. Too much understanding that a single lifetime isn’t enough for all the things you want to do, and if you avoid making tough choices when you’re young — as I did — you might not get the chance to do some of them. The truth is, I passed up a lot of opportunities and wasted a lot of my youth because I was afraid of making the wrong choice and getting stuck somewhere I didn’t want to be. And also because I didn’t have much self-confidence, and just didn’t believe I could do some things. And because I was too distracted with stupid shit that in retrospect didn’t really matter that much. Every birthday now is just another reminder of how damn stupid I’ve been about a lot of things. And that, like Elvis, I’m a long ways from the hunka-hunka-burnin’-love I used to be, and I am vain enough to be bothered about that. I’ve even recently noticed myself making old-man noises when I get out of bed and try to stretch the soreness out of all the bits that don’t quite want to work first thing in the morning. When the hell did that happen?

Classic mid-life crisis, I know. Cliche’d and boring if you can’t relate, depressing if you can. And probably pretty pathetic-sounding if you’re one of the lucky ones who’ve already had yours and passed through to the other side. Honestly, though, I often wonder if I’m ever going to get past it, because it seems like I’ve been struggling with a mid-life crisis since the morning after my college graduation. I woke up that day at the age of 22 and had a full-blown panic attack about what I was going to do with the rest of my life. I still haven’t figured it out.

Things might be different if I were more contented with my day-to-day existence. But sadly, things haven’t changed much for me since I wrote the following, some three years ago:

I don’t know how things got to be this way. It wasn’t so long ago that I had endless afternoons for wandering through toy stores in search of the latest collectible action figures, or for driving around with my sweetie, or for writing or blogging or simply being. God, I used to spend hours working on stories, lost in worlds of my own imagining and feeling like that was exactly where I was supposed to be. But now… now it doesn’t matter what I’m doing or for whose benefit, I am constantly aware of a clock ticking, a deadline or appointment approaching, always feeling the pressure of a to-do list that never seems to get any shorter, and lamenting more and more frequently that I have become a very boring person. I cringe at the thought of social engagements that ought to be pleasures. I even have a hard time with movies these days, because I often find myself thinking that I ought to be doing something more productive with the time I’m spending in front of the screen. Movies. My refuge and my love for longer than I can remember. I can’t tell you how depressing that is. My life isn’t supposed to be this way. I can’t even recall any more what I used to imagine my life was going to be like, but this damn hamster-wheel existence I find myself trapped in certainly wasn’t what I had in mind.

It’s that sense of urgency, a constant background level of anxiety about all the things I’m not managing to get done, that sends me into my periodic funks. I feel it throughout most of my waking hours, and it’s utterly draining. Paralyzing, really. It keeps me from doing everything from mundane chores to the things that really matter. I don’t exercise anymore, because I don’t have time. I can’t tell you when I last whiled away an entire afternoon reading, or managed to get through an entire DVD in one sitting. And you may have noticed how rarely I post here anymore. People ask me all the time why I don’t just make time to write fiction, or whatever it is I really want to do. They don’t get that I can’t. My default setting these days is “overwhelmed.”

If you’re feeling like getting me a present this year, another couple of hours of sunlight per day would be great…

And yet, my mood today really isn’t that dire. I took the day off from work and I’ve been catching up on some long-neglected stuff around the house and listening to music and playing with my kitty-boys, and tonight I’m going out with The Girlfriend for some yummy clam chowder, and all that makes for an okay birthday. I just wish I didn’t have to take vacation time to scrub my damn toilet…

Roger Ebert’s latest blog post makes me feel a little better about my growing curmudgeonliness, er, sense of disconnectedness from the culture around me. He begins by quoting a writer I’ve never heard of, Marshall McLuhan:

“Most people…still cling to what I call the rearview-mirror view of their world. By this I mean to say that because of the invisibility of any environment during the period of its innovation, man is only consciously aware of the environment that has preceded it; in other words, an environment becomes fully visible only when it has been superseded by a new environment; thus we are always one step behind in our view of the world.”

So far, this all sounds like the kind of ivory-tower “critical theory” claptrap that spooked me away from pursuing a Master’s degree in literature. But the post becomes quite a bit more interesting when Ebert applies McLuhan’s rearview theory to his own life. And here’s the section that really caught my eye:

In the media, I am analog by training and long habit. Phonograph records seem logical to me. Now that I can obtain any music in an instant on the internet, the music is no longer present. When I owned an LP album, I possessed something tangible. When I download an album from iTunes, I can listen to it, but I possess nothing I can touch. When I enter a theater and see a movie, I experience it differently than when I watch a video. The instant availability of tens of thousands of movies diminishes them somehow. In my nature I subscribe to the principle that a movie involves a screening in a place and at a time. The movie is an event. I do not make the mistake of believing my experience is better than those raised in digital immersion. Nor should they believe theirs is superior to mine. We are simply different; I have an older frame of reference. The fact is that my argument with video games may be a matter of my embedded nature. The thought of spending hours playing one fills
me with dismay. Nor are many gamers eager to read Balzac’s Lost Illusions, which I have just finished. Some are open to both. I applaud them.

Bingo. Now, I haven’t read Balzac myself, nor do I think it likely that I ever will. But this is merely a difference between my tastes and Ebert’s (or possibly an example of my own embedded nature, being a generation younger than him; certainly I’m more open to superhero movies than he seems to be!). Aside from that, however, what he says about tangible media so completely mirrors my own feelings that I wish I’d written it myself. I especially like the bit about how movies used to have a real significance that has been lessened by the evolution of home (or, I suppose these days, personal) video. I was just saying something along those lines to a younger coworker the other day… a much younger coworker who has no memory of  what it was like back when you had to see an incredible movie as many times in the theater as you could, because once it was gone there was no guarantee you’d ever see it again. He couldn’t imagine such a thing; I have moments when I miss it.

It doesn’t really matter, I suppose. Human beings have been lamenting for centuries how different things are now than when they were kids, and how, in their eyes, things used to be better. But it is nevertheless good to occasionally find some reassurance that you’re not the first to feel that way, as it often seems.

Incidentally, I told you the next couple entries wouldn’t mention the space shutt– oops. Sorry.

My father spent 36 years, most of his adult life, working for the same company, Kennecott Utah Copper. From my vantage point up here in the 21st century, where my current job is about to become the longest one I’ve ever held at a mere six years in, that’s an almost unimaginable level of job security and stability. Nowadays, it seems like the corporate overlords are determined that everybody ought to be freelancers who can be popped in and out of jobs like disposable electronic components, owing nothing and with nothing owed to them. It didn’t used to be that way. There used to be more of a reciprocal relationship between employee and employer, and a lot more loyalty from both sides of the equation. There was an understanding that if you were good at your job, and you liked it well enough, you were going to be there for the long haul.

Still, even in those days before the world moved on, no working person was ever 100% secure. When the price of copper tumbled in the early 1980s, Kennecott responded by shutting down its Bingham Canyon copper mine — one of the largest open-pit mining operations in the world — for two years. A couple thousand workers, including my father, were laid off. Fortunately, he was far more resourceful than I imagine I would be under the circumstances. He could and would do just about anything to earn a buck, and because of this, our little family made it through those two years without too much pain. They were lean years, to be sure, but they were never truly bad. Not for us, anyhow.

Of all the myriad odd jobs he did to hold things together, the most memorable was his gig as a long-haul truck driver, ferrying massive wooden roof trusses across the western states. The trusses were built in our little rural home town and were destined for new LDS church houses that were springing up in California, Idaho, and Wyoming at the time. And the reason I so clearly remember Dad doing this particular job is because I got to ride along with him on the truck a few times. I don’t remember for sure if these trips coincided with summer break, or if Dad just took me out of school when I wanted to go, but those were magical experiences for me. I was around 12 or 13, and even though Smokey and the Bandit and the CB radio craze were long over by then, I still found the whole idea amazingly cool: traveling with my dad in a truck (not a full-blown 18-wheeler, but still bigger than all the traffic around us), a couple of manly men with the wide-open landscape unrolling in front of us and who knew what around the next bend.

Continue Reading…

They say everyone has a doppelganger out there in the world somewhere, and I now have it on pretty good authority that mine is a music teacher from New Jersey. Seriously. According to my friends Keith and Danielle, the guy who’s giving lessons to their daughters looks just like me. So much so that their youngest girl was a little bit weirded out upon meeting me last night. But wait! It gets even creepier:

This dude’s name is Rick. My favorite musician’s name, as my Loyal Readers well know, is also Rick.

Rick the Music Teacher Who Looks Like Me plays the guitar. I own a guitar.

Rick the Music Teacher Who Looks Like Me eschews the Disney tunes and lame-o kiddie songs that are usually taught to children in favor of ’80s hits. I, of course, am all about the ’80s.

And lastly, Rick the Music Teacher Who Looks Like Me has an extensive collection of band t-shirts. And I… well, the resemblance is just frightening, I tell you!

I’m deeply curious about my apparent twin, but also cautious… what might happen if we were to meet? Would it disrupt the space-time continuum and destroy everything? It’s not worth that kind of risk, obviously. But still… I am intrigued…