The Distance to the Mid-Twenties

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been accused of being either twenty-four or twenty-five. I can flippantly attribute this to clean living, mainlining age retardants, and perhaps selling the soul I doubt I have to the Devil I know only exists as myth and an archetype. As of the second day of the upcoming calendar month, I'll be marking either the fourteenth or fifteenth anniversary of those respective ages. Perhaps, after so much practice, I've gotten rather good at being in my mid-twenties.

Although, I wonder what age I'd have been accused of being if I didn't have my beard...

Anyone playing the home game has probably figured out my view of time is rather dubious. Sometimes, I question whether the concept exists beyond a monkey-made construct. Perhaps digging on tomes of Buddhist philosophy and quantum physics will do that. Maybe, as my father has said, I did inherit my mother's contrary nature, though I would argue the point.

In some ways, I do feel something in common with how I felt in my mid-twenties; not fresh out of adolescence, but not quite to stage of being a full-fledged grown-up yet. Of course, I've never liked grown-ups that much, so I can't rightly say becoming one has ever been an aspiration. I think part of that mindset of being older but not came from becoming a parent at the tender age of twenty-two.

I am not as full of spite and angst as I was back then, even if I do still like my moments of punk rock. There is the cobweb of gray that runs through the dysfunctional calico, which is my mane. I no longer smoke clove cigarettes, and it has been almost three years since I've officially abstained from tobacco. Every so often, with shock and awe, I remember it's been almost twenty-two years since I moved back from North Carolina and twenty years since I graduated high school.

Amusingly, as I near the impending anniversary of my thirty-ninth orbit around the sun, I do not focus on how much linear time has gone by since twenty-four or twenty-five, which I apparently look like, or what my actual age will be. Instead, I catch myself winded by the fact I am nearly forty. Four decades. Half of eighty. Eighty seems to be getting to be the average lifespan of hominids in this part of the world. I am a little closer to end than the beginning. The distance from my mid-twenties increases moment by moment, and is a little fuzzier in my mind's eye. But then again, these days, when I want to see far or in low-light, I require my spectacles.

"It's hell growing up," my mother would say, but I would always tease her about being well over four-thousand years old. 

Sabina and I have a running joke about how if someone asked us x-amount of years ago that we would be where we are now, how we might react. My response almost always telling this nameless, faceless someone they're smoking crack through a light bulb. After all, I do not believe in fate. If, during my mid-twenties, it was prophesied I'd be living in the high country of the Colorado Rockies after having published a book and have lived near the monoliths of downtown of the greater metroplex with a former vampire queen, I'd have laughed, and perhaps, because my father, daughter, friends, and Sabina have all baselessly accused me of being contrary at one time or another, I might've done everything in my power to disprove the oracle.

Mei fei tsu. In a little more than two weeks, I'll stop being thirty-eight in clumsy timekeeping of the half-bald monkeys that call themselves Man. Time was when I would party like a rucking fockstar for a week to deal with this shift in linear paradigm. There was a phase when I would count down the shopping days until anniversary of my birth. I went through a phase where I thought the Transformers and Kiss were pretty neat, and, these days, neither really impresses me to rocket science. And, whilst I am not overly sure what I might do for my birthday, other than a potential walkabout, I do catch myself wondering if ten years ahead, I'll be accused of looking as though I'm still in my mid-thirties.