Age

40.

Let’s just let that sit there for a moment.

When I was a kid, and I know of no people my age that did not do this, I calculated how old I would be in the year 2000.  38 seemed ancient.  Really, really old.  I could not even fathom what 38 would feel like, let alone look like.  My parents and neighbors were the only reference that I could go by, and the future did not look bright.  A life full of lawns, ugly houses and bridge parties.  No thanks.  Anyway, I’d probably be dead by then.  Rust never sleeps, dude.

When I was 22, I shared an apartment with a guy who was 28.  We worked together building sets and acting in a children’s theater.  Our favorite activity was to smoke a lot of dope, play Scrabble and watch Dr. Gene Scott at 3am.  He also played jazz guitar and had some gigs around Rochester, though it wasn’t enough to pay the rent.  When he turned 29 he went into an almost perpetual funk.  He would mope around the apartment and lost the will to play Scrabble.

“Man,” he took to saying in a voice that was both gravelly and reedy at the same time, “If I don’t have a steady gig by the time I’m 30, I’m going back to Syracuse and work on the factory line with my Mom.”

It was during this time that I decided that I would never allow myself to feel that pathetic about turning 30.

My sister turned forty a few years ago.  “Guess what we got her,” my Mom crowed, “A Fortieth birthday party kit!!  Black balloons, black crepe paper, black hats!!  Isn’t that hysterical?!”

No, it was not. I told her in no uncertain terms that this would not be an acceptable part of my fortieth birthday package.

So.  40.

Here I am at almost 39 with friends turning forty all around me.  Some don’t care.  Some are freaking out.  I would like to think that I don’t care.  Yes, I’m almost 39, about 20 pounds over weight, with a wife, two kids and two cars.  What of it?

The thing is is that I don’t feel like I’m anywhere near 40, or rather, what I was lead to believe that 40 would feel like.  I don’t feel dead.  I don’t feel like my life is over or close to ending.  I don’t feel pangs of regret over roads not taken.  Was I lied to?  Is this whole 40 thing just some kind of bizarre societal ruse to make sure that you (as a manager at Wendy’s once told me) “get with the program?”  The only thing I really feel about approaching 40 is that I’m a freak for not really caring about it.

Actually, that’s not completely true.  It freaks me out that other people see me as approaching 40.

Anecdote 1 – There’s a silly little program called LifeFX.  It allows you to send emails with talking heads that read your emails to the recipient.  The talking head is computer generated and the emoticons (the sideways happy/sad/winking faces :-)) don’t always look like they should.  One woman who’s supposedly smiling looks like she’s taking a dump.  The voice is computer generated, as well, and sounds like a computer generated voice.  This opens up a wide range of comedic value.  Try it sometime!

I was playing around with it at work one day, trying out various effects.  The week before I had used the clown face to send a bogus cover email to a possible job ("When people don't want to hire me, it makes me want to burn down their houses").  Today, I had decided to make the clown speak “Knock Three Times.”  Things were going swimmingly and I was, as usual, cracking myself up.  A twenty-something guy (I have the urge to say “kid” which maybe I’ll get into later) who had loved the previous clown came up to see what I was working on.  I played it for him:

“Hey, Girl/Whatcha doing down there/Dancing alone every night while I live right above you”

“What the FUCK are you doing?!  What IS that?!," he exclaimed.

“What are you talking about?  It’s Knock Three Times!”

“What?!”

“Knock Three Times!”  I sang a little of it to him.  He continued to stare at me blankly.

“Tony Orlando and Dawn?”

     “I   Don’t   Under    Stand   The   Words   You   Are   Using,” he said very slowly and deliberately using fake sign language to accentuate the point.

Would it be pointless to try to explain that I was using a song that the majority of my generation learned how to hate pop music with as an ironic device?  Yes, it would have been.

“It’s...uh...just a song I grew up with,” I mumbled.

Anecdote 2 – At a recent job, the head of my department changed.  Rather, the category that the IT department changed from Engineering (?) to Customer Service (?).  Being the only employee in the IT department, I had a meeting with my new boss.  He’s a truly nice guy, whose attitude of openness and honestly I admire.  He asked some questions about what I did and how I did it.  He voiced his opinion of how things should work and some of the changes he’d like to make.  It was a lovely chat.

Then, a somewhat somber look came over his face.

“Now,” he started, “I wanted to find out a little about what people thought about you, so I asked around the office.  I wanna be straight with you, cuz that’s how I am.  If you don’t agree with me, you can tell me I’m fulla shit and I won’t argue.”

This was gonna be good, I thought.

“Everybody likes you.”  He smiled broadly as though to illustrate the point.  “They think you’re a hard worker ready to do what it takes to get the job done."  He gave a kind of a facial thumbs-ups. “No one questions your dedication.”  One of those thoughtful diagonal nods.  “There’s some people, though, and I don’t know how to say so I’m just gonna say it...that they find you a little...”, he paused as if trying to figure out how to say it, “immature.  I’m telling you this cuz it’s important to know for your professional development.  I mean, you’re what, coming up on 40…”

I admit that after he said that I tuned out a little.  He said a bunch of things that seemed to indicate that I was enjoying my job too much for people to take me seriously.  He also questioned my proclivity for shorts, un-tucked shirt and sandals in the summer time, although this was a start-up in the truest sense of the word and the 50-something CEO often wore bike shorts.  “I don’t thing it works in your favor if you come in looking like you just got back from a concert,” he said.

I smiled and nodded and mm-hm’d through what hit me as some kind of 90’s update of a Buñel film.  The thought crossed my mind to look at him and say “Plastics, Ben.”

Anecdote 1 is the easiest to deal with.  The sting was intense but wore off quickly.  I have never really seen myself as being all that “cool” but it’s still a blow when someone independently confirms the fact.  I have passed the age where you would think that such things would not be important.  But despite all that I’ve gone through to distance myself from these kinds of non-material trappings (therapy, drug and alcohol abuse, 12-step programs), they still poke their fuzzy little heads up from time to time.  Why should I be depressed that some little twenty-something piece of shit doesn’t “get” a perfectly good reference?!  Huh?!  After all, aren’t they all into that 70’s revival crap anyway?  I mean, where did he come off giving me that more-ironical-than-thou attitude?

Anecdote 2, on the other hand, plunged me into a tidy little black hole for a few days.  Yes, during the whole “talking to” as it might have been called in my day, my attitude was “fuck you.”  I was completely indignant.  I think I even dragged somebody downstairs to howl, piss and moan about it.  But after I’d gotten it out of my system, the thought remained – Did people really consider me immature?  And if so, did I care?  And if I did care, was I willing to put on the adult drag and pretend to their faces that I was indeed ready to enter the Secret Society of Adults?

By the time I got home from work that day, I was ready to curl up under the covers and not come out.

If you consider, I tried to tell myself, that most of my peers used their 20’s productively to graduate college, build careers and create “nest eggs” instead of pissing it away on acting and alcohol, like I did, I’m in a pretty good place.  Given the fact that I learned my current profession on the fly, I’m doing ok for being 10 years behind the pack.  I’ve got a wife, two kids and a nice apartment.  The car’s paid for.  I have some lovely material trappings – a nice amp, a DVD player.  We’re getting some money put away for a house...

“They find you a little...immature.”

I’m not immature, I’m not immature, I’m not immature, I’M NOT FUCKING IMMATURE!  Fuck you and fuck everybody like you and fuck your dog, too, while you’re at it you big, fat fucker-fuck-fuck!

OK.  Maybe I was a little immature.  But that was OK.  Again, I had a little catching up to do.  I would tuck in my shirt, like he said.  I could maybe not be as jovial.  I’d stay at my desk and write more memos.  Maybe I could figure out whom to suck up to.  I needed to work on that, since I’ve never been to good at it.  “Just stopping by, Mr. CFO to see how that machine was running!  Hey, did you catch that article in the Wall Street Journal about...”  “Hey, Mr. CTO, I was just reading RFC1206 when it occurred to me that maybe we could...” Yeah.  That was a start.  I could do that.  That’s what adults did, right?  Suck up.  Pretend to like people they hated.  Sure.  I’d been putting this character development thing off for far too long.

It took a lot of discussion with people to figure out that, indeed, I was ok the way I was.  I’d fallen back into the old High School Trap of putting too much stock in what people thought about me.  My friends, when I told them about the incident, mostly laughed.  “That’s one of the things we like about you,” they said.  My wife was very supportive.  She told me that there was no way that I could get to where I was if I was the person I was being painted as.  And, after awhile, I came to reconcile myself to it.  It turns out that the company that I started working for had changed its culture without telling anyone.  They’d gone from funky, fast-moving shoot from the hip start-up to phone company rigidity.  It wasn’t me.  It was them.

Anger.

Denial.

Fear.

Acceptance.

I can never think about Kubler-Ross without thinking of the Lenny Bruce line – “This chick who, without having the benefit of dying herself, came up with this theory...”

40.

I’m not there yet.  I don’t know what it will be like.  Check back in a year.  Right now, I’m gonna go get a nipple ring.