Today I'm 50.

It feels pretty great despite the fact I decided to vacuum (this is sad but I had to look this word up just now in the large print dictionary I took from my dead mothers' house) my keyboard and I sucked up two of the keys and now I have to gut a vacuum bag full of five-month old carpet debris.

Why, why, why, why??? Oh yeah, I forgot. I wasn't going to whine anymore.

But I digress, in fact, I could go on and on lamenting about the cards I didn't get from my friends and relatives and how every birthday, no matter how I hard I try, I end up crying and having a pity-party over the littlest things, for Goddess knows what reason. This started at age 1 and there's some old 16 mm footage to prove it.

Instead, if I practice the latest best-selling mantras touted in "The Secret" craze I would get more cards if I was a nicer person, abundently nicer.

I'm just not sure I'm capable of nice.

The best gift so far was a phone call last night from my hippie, free-spirit son in Oregon. He and his girlfriend are leaving Oregon because it didn't turn out to be the Utopia he thought. Instead, he told me in a disgusted voice, it's filled with Yuppie posers pretending to be hippies.

The gall.

He's heading to Missouri with the goal of planting and harvesting the biggest vegetable garden he's ever attempted, with a little fence all around it and an archway at the entrance.

I told him that was about the noblest thing a person could do in life. That you could learn a lifetime's worth of lessons just watching things grow.

"Just make sure it's vegetables," I told him, not something else green and leafy. I don't think Missouri is Oregon, if you get my drift. I don't think the law in some of those Missouri counties is anything like Andy of Mayberry.

Anyway, there's still things I want to do in life, at age 50, so that's hopeful.

Live on an Indian reservation.
Write for Rolling Stone. Crazy, insane stuff while they spout "We love it! This is genius!"
Fit into my lime green size 12 jeans.
Wake up in Tuscany nestled between 600-thread-count sheets and wonder how I got there.
Speak fluent Porteguese and read erotic poetry aloud
And, as usual:
Scream on the top of my lungs during an inappropriate moment.

I'll refrain as well from echoing platitudes and wise sayings and crap like that.
The best advice I got was from my 87-year-old aunt, who said beginning this day I should get up off the floor, once in the morning and once at night, without holding on to anything.

"You've heard of people who fall and can't get up," she said. "Well, that's why, because they never do!"

I think that says it all.

Rust


never



sleeeps.