I was born old. When I was five I was reading oceanography books and astronomy books. When I was ten I was trawling through the adult history section of the library looking for good histories of WWII or the American revolution. I think that was around the first time I read a Liddell Hart strategy book.

I was sick all the time and an only child. You put those things together and I became one serious motherfucking kid. Toss in a moderately tumultuous childhood and it’s a wonder I wasn’t wearing a little suit and tie trying to look like proto-neo-conservative policy wonk. What kind of maniac 14 year old goes out of his way to find a book on strategic theories on the uses of nuclear weapons?

I should have been out there doing my damnest to get laid. This is why I’m so screwed up and while the last failed four years hit me so hard. I should have been drunk. I should have been fucking those two girls I had a horrible crush on, Alexa and Maria. I should have gotten into fights with seniors and broken some noses. I didn’t do that.

I wanted to.

I didn’t.

Oh, lordy, lordy, how I wanted to mix it up in life, and instead, was a scaredy kitten, just with out the cute and cuddly as my selling point. Why? Self-destruction as detailed in earlier, just as unseemly places on this website.

[Why all the nasty self-destruction since time immemorial? I have no good idea. Only some tantalizing hints. This lack of real knowledge and understanding plagues me. How to get to the genesis? How to reach all the way back and pull all that shit out so you can see it? To rob it of its power and laugh at it all? Come on neuroscience! Save me from myself and do it quick!]

Somehow through all of this…life in all its wonder and glory, managed to evade my frail old man’s liver spotted arthritic clutches.

After too many years of standard American life, of buying crap I didn’t need to solve problems I didn’t have, of working and slaving for nothing more than a decent check and a few silly investments, of watching a whole lot of mind destroying television, I went crazy and had myself a mid-life crisis.

Nothing special although I did mine backwards.Backwards in that it was really the first time I had done any of the stuff everyone else at 30 had long since put behind them but was gearing up to do again like they did when they were young. Over thirty and for the first time I was putting a tentative toe in the ocean.

In the glory days of my wandering, anyone who had settled down, had kids, had jobs, had spouses, inevitably told me they envied me and my freedom. When they retired they were definitely going to get on the road. I was so lucky. The irony is that I’d look at their lives with their families and careers and connections and I’d be jealous of them.

Everyone else’s life always looks better.

Now I’m aging backwards ever further. I finally got around to loving someone and having that relationship die. I’m around 14 again. Fuck.

A midlife crisis. A teenage crisis. What the fuck could be next?! Am I going to have to go through potty training again?

I’m not anal rententive in that Freudian way. I think I’ve mastered that aspect of life! Don’ t make me do it again! My coworkers will be pissed off about that when I start pooping all over the kitched at the restuarant.

Maybe I’ll finally get to move forward and stop all this regressive life education shit, I am so sick of it.

Although, it should be noted, breast feeding might be kind of fun. I could use some antibodies. We could all use some antibodies.

And while all this crap has been happening, all this reverse aging and neverending ponderous introspective thought, I’m engaging in a kind of fast forward emotional explosion and I’m learning about all sorts of cool things like film/video production, web technologies, foreign policy, cooking, and a host of other interests.

And in addition to all of that crap on top of the crap, I’m just plain old getting old. I can feel the age creep up on me sometimes. My spring isn’t quite so sprung and it’s horrifying to notice that.

“HOLY SHIT! I AM FUCKING DYING! My knees are crumbling. The process…it’s started! HOLY SHIT! I AM GETTING OLD! SON OF A BITCH!!!”

I’m aging backwards and I’m aging forwards at the same time. How stupid is that?

And on top of all that additional crap heaped on the mound of crap, over flowing crap that splatters like a pot of spaghetti sauce dropped from the Eiffel Tower, I’ve got no people.

My interests are the wild and envelope pushing that most people get smashed out of them when they’re just out of college. I have the tastes of a widely read college age kid and I just happen to be smack dab in middle age.

This is a peculiar place to be. For instance, last night I was at a club called Solar Culture listening to some DJ types do sets of house music. I danced and shook and grooved to the music despite my funk lacking dancing abilities (it’s embarassing being so poorly coordinated but I refused to let that stop me since the revelation that I needed to go out to scare myself). I was the oldest person on that city block at that time. There was no one at all even remotely close to my age.

So where the fuck was my peer group?

My peers have lives that don’t allow them to be dancing at 12 AM on a Monday in a little club with no air conditioning. They have long since lost their interest and spend their evenings sipping wine at dinner while they chat about their office jobs and the uncertainty in their quarterly budgets. They talk about their fucking colons…

[note: Not anal fucking which would at least be kind of interesting. Everyone loves a story of a sexual encounter gone well or gone awry, the more awry comically the better.]

…They watch scripted reality TV where idiots and morons vie to be the most idiotic and the most moronic. They seem to have given up and gotten stuck and wish for a time when they were younger and happier. I tell them of wandering around the US and they tell me they’ll do that one day…one day.

At least that’s been my observation. I could be wrong.

And that’s the thing, I have huge monstrous gaping regrets whenever I look back on my life but, at the same time, it’s infinitely better than it was 10 years ago. I’m still pissed off, having conversations in my head I’ll never have in reality, asking silent “Why would you do that?!” questions to a woman that couldn’t give a shit anymore, and I still can’t eat much without getting vomitous.

And I can now see so much of all I did wrong, and now I might be able to contemplate how I might just make it right…

I suppose that I have hope for the first time in my life.