Once in a Lifetime

I can’t take credit for the following, as I heard the sentiment voiced on a Chris Hardwick podcast, but I can agree completely. Every year that passes causes the song “Once in a Lifetime” to make a hell of a lot more sense than it did the year before.

Let’s start by putting things in perspective. The song came out in 1981 when I was eight and if I remember correctly we got cable in 1982 or 1983 so I would have been nine or ten when I first saw the video. And what would that video mean to me as a kid? Well, it was bizarre enough to make me laugh. Here is a skinny guy with glasses in a suit, sweating like mad, just flailing about and periodically making chopping motions on his arm. Absolutely nothing made sense, David Byrne bounces in and out of frame, and throughout all this time there is this amazing back beat while David wonders “This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife.” At ten, I found this to be unbelievably cool and, sad to say, probably had already realized that I would grow up to look, sweat and dance pretty much exactly like David Byrne does in this video.

“You may ask yourself: Well? How did I get here?”

I’m turning forty this year. This is not unusual. Everyone born in 1973 will experience this same phenomenon this year so I can’t act as if this is some type of great insight but it really is hitting me. And to be honest, I have no idea how I got here. I do have a beautiful house with a beautiful wife. And I find myself behind the wheel of a…Ford Taurus, which is a very respectable automobile if I can say so myself. For the longest time I would never have dreamed to be in this position when I turned forty. Sometimes I still can’t believe it.

“You may ask yourself: How do I work this?”

The fact is getting older hasn’t made me feel as though I am more of an adult even though clearly I am. I still have dreams about high school and college and like apparently every other male my age we just can’t seem to grow up. I own a full collection of Voltron DVDs. I am still searching for a good collection of the full series of the Monkees and have gotten into serious debates as to why they need to be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Half the time I look around clueless and the other half I pretend that I actually know what I am doing. It works, somehow, yet the older I get the more baffled by the world I seem to become. That sense of self-righteousness disappears as the gray hair makes it first appearance.

“You may ask yourself: Am I right? Am I wrong?”

I’ve basically stopped writing for the past few years after literally writing a novel a year for over a decade. (Well, more like I wrote more than 60,000 words a year with absolutely no connection between them other than I was the one typing.) It was probably a big mistake as writing is my main release of thoughts and ideas and tension and all of those other things. But the reason my writing output slowed was because I actually had a life. Kim and I started dating and got engaged and got married and I had to go through this process of changing from I to We which is still a challenge that I haven’t quite mastered. While it is great to know that my personal life and my career have far surpassed what I have ever hoped for it just seems wrong to not sit down and write and give my view of the world.

“Time isn’t holding us; Time isn’t after us.”

So I guess I will be back in the blogging biz if I can hold to my New Year’s Resolution. I have no idea what is ahead of me, or where in my day I am going to find the time to sit down with a laptop and just see where the words take me. Like the Mayans, I didn’t expect to get here. But the journey is always fun.

I’ll end with a quote that my favorite writer, Jonathan Carroll, posted to Facebook this week that has sat on my mind the way most of his quotes do. “Listen, are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?”