You Are Old, Father William

 Another birthday. 

If you'd played a card from a standard pack on every one of my birthdays you would have just played your last card. 

I have outlived Michael Jackson, Napoleon, Shakespeare, Harold Hardrada, Proust and Moliere, Antonin Artaud and Calamity Jane. You know, THE GUYS. 

When you've got a group like that to measure yourself against, merely outliving them seems a bit shoddy. It looks like procrastination, but what it really is is dumb luck. I've just hung around. I've not written Hamlet. I've not been impersonated by Doris Day. I've not lined my bedroom with cork. My severed penis was not exhibited in New York City in 1927. Most of these things are not even achievable. 

I have a lot I still want to do. It is horrific to find oneself suddenly ambitious in one's fifties. It's a cruel joke that by the time I finally feel fully "cooked", my sell-by-date has already passed. 

Perhaps it's just existential panic. Perhaps art is no more than carving your initials on a tree, or a caveman blowing a stencil of his outstretched hand onto a cave wall. "I was here."

Twice in the last week, different people have intimated that I might be too old to properly negotiate the culture, that my assumptions - rather, their assumptions about my assumptions - are fogeyish and blinkered. They didn't even mean it unkindly. It was a given - like my failing eyesight or not knowing who's top of the hit parade*. They might be right. I may have nothing to offer the modern world. Already I feel my past, my lived experience, is unknowable to people born in this century. And their lives are likewise incomprehensible to me. Maybe I should talk to a young person. They keep you in the game, dont they. Having kids must mean you're confronted by a new strangeness every day. I think I was utterly alien to my dad. 

I make the lazy assumption myself that human beings are mostly the same, more alike than different, and there are basic ur-humanities common to not only everyone alive today, but to every human who ever lived. We all want love, to be understood and to understand. We want to be remembered - by someone, if not everyone. We want to have mattered. To not have squandered our brief go at this. But I'm probably wrong. We're all strange, distant stars, orbiting one another in the cold emptiness of space. Separate, remote, ultimately unknowable. 

I still don't think that's true. We're sociable animals. I prefer to believe we invented language to communicate, rather than to obfuscate and disguise our true intentions. I've been on the bus in Belfast - we're not a sophisticated species. Mind you, using the same test group we're not the great communicators we think we are either. 

Anyway, Happy Birthday To Me. 

Many Happy Returns. 

You should see the pile of gifts I've got - shameful in a man of my years. Dinner tonight - quiet and at home - will be lavender chicken (a house specialty) some French wine and perhaps a glass of Japanese whiskey. 

I was here. 

*This one was on purpose. Even I don't say "hit parade".