Reflections of an old man

Yesterday was a day of contemplation for me. It's a strange thing, somewhere in my mind, I already was thirty; I had accepted my thirtyness entirely and even had to correct myself once when someone asked my age because I jumped the thirty gun. And then yesterday came along and I was suddenly, totally and irrevocably thirty and it landed on me like a ton of rectangular building things.

I never thought my life would be like this at thirty. It's a terrible cliche, but as Terry Pratchett says, cliches are the hammer and screwdriver in the toolbox of communication. I actually started thinking about the ramifications of the phrase before church yesterday and discovered that it was true. Certain people will tell you that there were things that they always wanted to do, which is a stretch, but to say you never thought something, well that's pretty easy. So here's what I did think:

When I was in elementary school, I figured my latent super powers would manifest sometime before high school (laugh if you want to, I bet you did too). In junior high I really didn't even expect to make it to high school, having been crushed under the weight of the world. In high school my destiny was to have my first novel published by the time I graduated college (I didn't even finish writing my first novel [which was published by a scam firm] until the year after I graduated). In college, I discovered several expectations, my horizon of ignorance having expanded. I still expected my novel to be finished and on the shelves before I graduated, but I added to this a belief that I would be a youth minister, get married and have a little house somewhere in North County before I hit twenty-five. 0-3.

At the quarter century, I think I finally gave up on the time restriction. I still wanted a place and family of my own. The job has shifted from a youth minister to working year round at a camp somewhere, or possibly becoming a professional screenwriter (a job I am not convinced I would like but one that I fully believe I have the talent for). I think that the big change in my thinking is not where I'm going, but that there really isn't a feeling of expectation associated with it any more. I expect to break my hip again sometime before I hit fifty. I expect to suffer from dementia in my early eighties. I expect to give the Reaper a good run for his money, but I expect he'll win that race eventually. As far as expectations go, that's about it, but as in Greek mythology, there's always one thing left sitting in the bottom of the box. I still have hope.

On a less philosophic note, I called Philmont this morning and asked for a job.

Sorry, my fingers turned to lead there after a I wrote that and I had to start another paragraph. Don't get me wrong, I love Philmont. I love the place, I love the people, I love the job, I even love the bizarre, ridiculous situations I somehow always run into out there. The problem is that Philmont lies at the border between reality and imagination. It's as if there are people and places there that are half here in the corporial plane and half in the etherial realm of the heart. When you go there, you become a little imaginary yourself, and I've been there so many times. It's almost as if my life has become imaginary, and yet something always comes back to California, driving my car, greeting my friends, punching the keys at my computer. I could be content to live in that storybook world and fade away into the legend I have been called there, or I could live in this real world with the buildings and television sets and neckties. The thousand miles in between are what tear me in half every time. With half a year in one world and half a year in another, I never feel like a whole person.