What are you seeing, exactly?
Yourself, in a tux?
Maybe marriage was the secret. You’ve felt nothing at all like envy for your friends who had wedded—happily or not—and especially the ones who’d had children—willingly or not—in between, say, first job and the big 3-Oh. And you could see the simpletons on the horizon from your rear-view, left behind, not knowing what hit them, not wanting to know: the living dead. Okay, and what were you doing? You were holding out (you thought) so as to avoid those foolish fates: settling, cashing in the chips, neither ahead nor behind, contemporary but cautious, invulnerable but apathetic, respectable but repressed, safe but stifled, alive but not living. Average. Equal. Indifferent. Existing. Okay.
Maybe the secret is that there is no secret. People with families—real people—look the way they do for a reason: they’re real; they have families. Once kids become part of the equation, you’re obliged (or allowed?) to stop worrying so much about yourself. Plenty of parents still want to go out and stumble back from a long night at a bar (and some still do); they’d all like to cut loose on occasion, they just can’t afford to.
So, was it the societally induced, cliché-laden, baggage-buried trigger of turning thirty that awakened the yearning—bordering on panic—which you’d long since grown accustomed to feeling? The clock ticking, or the spirit (understandably?) waning, human patience expiring, realistic, even healthy, skepticism about the passage of time and the consequences of inertia? Was your heart betraying you or your brain warning you, or some unkind combination of the two, shaken up in the martini tumbler of circumstance, this chemical chaos of living in the very early twenty-first century?
Were you losing faith? Or were you realizing (too soon, morbidly) what you’d be missing later in life?
Who are you seeing, exactly?
Look around; look at all these people, equally motivated or miserable or misguided, as well as the handful of hard cases, who’d somehow never figured out how not to be happy. All those people; the same person.
And, you know: Once you reach the age where you want to begin lying about how old you are (signified by the day you begin losing the hair on your head and find it turning up in places it has no business being, like your back, your shoulders, your ears and especially your nose) you want to slow down, avoid the wreckage that is ruining everyone around you. You spend your formative years cultivating your own unique set of issues and get to a certain age (some people actually become adults) where you realize you have issues, and they’re the only things you own that no one else wants. Then you work toward eradicating your issues, and the strongest amongst us survive and eventually some of them make money sitting there, listening to people (who are paying them) talk about their issues. Then, inevitably, sitting around and listening to people talk about their issues helps them develop an accelerated, more complicated set of issues. No one gets out of here unscathed, and you may think you’ve got life beat, but it waits, then sucker punches you in sudden death overtime.
And, you think: you’ll never be that guy. The guy who sits on toilet seats without a second thought; who might use the restroom half a dozen times a day and look at himself in the mirror once, or twice, tops; who actually doesn’t mind—or, perhaps, secretly prefers—lukewarm coffee (or, worse, decaf, or, worst, the kind served over ice for five bucks and change); who can eat bologna sandwiches and avoid meat (even bologna) on Fridays during Lent; who believes that God blesses America and that Jesus Christ is a capitalist; who can relate to anyone playing or providing commentary on a game of golf; who buys clothes—or food, or appliances, or fiancées for that matter—from a catalog; who is actually entertained by movies, or books, or albums, or people that put entertainment before aesthetic, or amusement before honesty; or sales before soul. You’ll never, in short, be a normal person.
*Excerpted from my novel Not To Mention a Nice Life, available June 17.
