30 - 40 - 50 - 60

Thirty hit me hard.  I got sober; I got clean; I quit smoking; I got in shape; I got serious with SuperK.

Forty hit me hard, too.  I didn't like the kind of work I was doing so I got busy and started interviewing for all the different kinds of jobs that sounded good and fun and fulfilling to me, that promised more joy or satisfaction than what I was doing, and I took some classes at the university level.  You know what I found?  That I had it pretty good - the new careers required evening or weekend hours or promised less money - a lot less money - or more schooling - a lot more schooling - or threatened me with relocation.  I was glad I interviewed even though it went nowhere.  I had to know.

Fifty leveled me.  Fifty was the "holy shit personal body things are starting to hurt or break or quit working" revelation.  Moreover, I found that I wasn't able to stretch or exercise my way through the aches and pains like in the past.  Gutting it out turned into injuring something.  And even the shit that didn't hurt wasn't working that well anymore.  I began to get a real sense of my own mortality, that I don't inhabit a perpetual motion machine.  That the machine I do inhabit is going to break, that it's going to give out eventually.  As unbelievable as this sounds I didn't see it coming.

So here comes sixty.  I guess when you see a handful of people who came before you disappear into the gloaming you sense that there really is an end game and shit is going to end.

I mean the average life expectancy of a male in The States is 78 years although to be fair if you make it to 65 then you have a good chance of hanging in there a good while longer.  I would imagine that all the drunks dying early drags down the average.  Then again that's no guarantee that the quality of life is going to be great.

I don't want to sound morbid.  I'm not thinking of death at all and I'm surely not worried about it.  And while these numbers ending in zeroes are just numbers and not anymore significant than the on immediately preceding it or the one that immediately follows, they are markers of sorts and I think I laugh them off completely at my own peril.