Aging like Fine Wine

I had a birthday this week. Pretty much a non-event. I’m at that age where there is nothing to celebrate anymore, it’s just a better than average arbitrary excuse to drink too much. I can already vote, drink, drive, get drafted, and rent a car. Pretty much the only thing left to look forward to is that inevitable moment when I realize I wasted my youth watching tv shows that featured laugh tracks. I think the over-under on the mid life crisis is about 35.

One potential positive though, I look young for my age. This is both a blessing and a curse. On the upside, when I’m older and dating women half my age, it’ll be way less creepy. But on the other hand, I occasionally get laughed at when I order beer. I suppose it’s the price I pay. I have started noticing the tell-tale signs though. I’m starting to get those little lines around my eyes, the ones that really haggard blonds have when they faked tanned too much. It’s not worth it ladies. Doing that to yourself is like putting a turbocharger on an engine, it might make it run a little hotter now, but the lifespan on that sucker goes in the toilet. Nobody wants to date a catcher’s mitt.

Also, I’ve noticed aging more in my peer group than in myself. When the women that your friends are dating start to look old I think that’s a bigger shock than seeing your buddies turn in to fat old guys. It’s because women are held to a higher standard. We equate feminine beauty with youth. It’s an evolutionary thing; we are attracted to women who have higher reproductive potential. This is why women panic when they think they are getting old and haven’t found a mate. It’s hard to tell yourself not to settle when your ovaries are audibly ticking. One the other hand, our swimmers are good for the long haul. Hence, we find our selves saying things like, “Is that his daughter? Oh wait, look where his hand is… definitely not his daughter… ok… hopefully not his daughter.”

They say stress ages you. So far I’ve been pretty craftily avoiding the stuff. I’ve been dodging and weaving and so far it hasn’t laid a glove on me that I couldn’t roll with pretty easily. Now that I’m in the real world though I can see it starting to raise its head. Actual responsibility is a new experience for me. The fact that things I do matter to people other than me is pretty intense. This is actually a pretty well crafted experiment to see whether stress is what makes people look older. If you check on me in a year and I’m aging like Dorian Gray after confronting his picture then we have our evidence.

“Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego”

~Norman Mailer

How true. Sitting down to write and not being able to produce content isn’t about your mind becoming vacant. It’s about the fear that the thoughts that are coming out of it are shit. No matter how mentally exhausted, stupid, or unoriginal you get, there is always something going on upstairs. Just this weekend I listened to some idiot girl describe to me, for a full thirty minutes, a highly detailed list of what she had for dinner and her equally uninteresting opinions about that wonderful feast. This person had no qualms about broadcasting her marginally coherent and tedious thoughts into the world. Presumably, this is because she was attractive enough that no one had ever bothered to inform her that she was retarded. However, she will never experience writers block. I’m quite sure that she could sit down with her crayons and write an uninterrupted stream of content off the top of her pretty little head. “Me and my bestest friend in the whole world Julie, she’s like the coolest, oh my god, went to the like the best restaurant ever in the whole world for dinner and had the most amazing lobster soup. OH MY GOD! That lobster soup was AWESOME. I must have eaten like the whole bowl. Oh my god, it was like awesome. Maybe not as good as the lobster soup at … (I blacked out here for about 20 minutes)… I can’t believe I ate the whole bowl. I’m so fat. But it was so, like, good. Awesome. So Good. Like. Awesome.”

Sorry for subjecting you to that, but I felt it really drove home the point. You don’t stop having thoughts just because you are unoriginal and annoying. Just some people have enough respect for other literates that they are hesitant to advance their ideas in written form. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever produced anything over a paragraph long that I didn’t think was garbage. Writers block is a symptom. It is a result of a lack of a necessary arrogance. To write you have to think that your viewpoint deserves to be preserved. Even if no one reads it (perhaps a blog?), writing is like any other activity that people can judge you on. You can’t be good at it unless you have confidence. You gotta go in cocky.