Stupido 54

 It's my birthday, and I'm very definitely sliding out of late middle-age and into the cool, musty hinterlands of being properly old. The vultures are now wheeling high over head. Bird saliva drops onto my silvery hair. They're making that noise eagles do in films. You know the one. 

Here's a list of people I've outlived this year: Babe Ruth, George Michael, Lenin, Tchaikovsky, Ivan the Terrible, Mary Shelley, Descartes, Maria Callas and Jack Ruby. 

They all died at 53. 

It's safe to say all those people are more famous than me. Well, Ivan the Terrible was terrible and, you know, only famous through an accident of birth. Jack Ruby seems like a dick. Babe Ruth hit a ball with a stick for a job, and I can't respect that. But the rest did pretty well. I was going to say that Descartes, in his short(ish) life, even found time to sleep in an oven. But I then made the foolish mistake of fact-checking something I definitely knew about Descartes, and it turned out he didn't, in fact, sleep in an oven. He slept in a room heated by an oven, which is not the same thing at all. Fact-checking ruins all your best stories. This is probably why nobody but dicks like me fact-check anymore, certainly not journalists or politicians. 

I've slept in a toilet. So, at least I did that. Walk away, Rene. 

Mary's a bit of a nepo baby, and her best work was done as a teenager. She's the Chesney Hawkes of proto sci fi/ horror visionaries. As a late bloomer, I can only marvel at this. Getting that big hit out early and just riding the wave for the rest of your life. Sweet. She's the Belouis Some, the Hollywood Beyond, of Gothic speculative fiction. Much better than my approach, which was arse about for forty odd years, realise you've accomplished nothing, panic, clench, and squeeze out a series of comic novels and memoirs just as your author photo is starting to become an active deterrent to the public. 

I can't even wear a black roll-neck now. I look like slices of thick-cut feta balanced on a Goth's bog-roll. 

I'm older than George Michael ever got to be. The more I learn about George, the more I like him. It seems he was a lovely man. We will never now duet, George. I'd have written the lyrics. I haven't yet achieved Ridgley-esque prowess on the guitar, though I can now play nine chords. Though, for me, holding the third string on the second fret counts as a chord, okay? It's some sort of D variant, I think. 

Cheekbones like geometry and eyes like sin

Anyway, 54. No longer "early 50's". Definitely "mid-50's", now. In a couple of years, I'll be "late 50's", then "old". No great insights here. That's just how time works. At the moment. In the future, if there is a future, time may work differently. We may be able to loop round to the past, we may be able to arrest aging, for rich people, anyway. But that's not where the science is heading at the moment. What science is up to, right now, is taking all artistic endeavour and smushing it up into a sort of shitty paste. All painting, all cinema, all writing, fed into a cultural woodchipper so people don't have to pay artists anything any more, even though they never did. There's no "starving plumber" trope. They've already done music. Now it's everything else. That's where science is now. I'm still doing the washing up and cleaning the toilet, but AI is writing poetry.  So that's a load off. 

Someone once said, "The world isn't coming to an end - you just think it is because you're middle-aged". It was probably Steven Moffatt. But I'm not so sure. Looks like the world is going very badly wrong. Genocide in Gaza. The crushing of Ukraine. Putin's evil web of international liars and his puppet states. That lunatic in the White House destroying his country and his country's history, literally white-washing it. And Musk and the other billionaires running amok, unopposed. 

Musk is inexplicable. How this absolute moron - I imagine he's pretty good at coding -  but I judge people on their actions and what they say, and what he says is utterly cretinous, is even wealthy baffles me. I mean, his dad owned an emerald mine, but... His rockets blow up, and his ridiculous plastic cars come unstuck and burn like Bostik on your front lawn. He didn't invent Pay-Pal either. Yet we have to listen to him, bouncing up and down, wearing his baseball cap over his grocer's grass hair, using his son as a human shield, and throwing his Nazi salutes.

He'll be 54 this year as well. We'd have been in the same school year. And yet, he's the richest man in the world, and I spend literal years writing books that not even my closest friends can be bothered to read, books that Elon's AI could knock out in seconds. And the public - if I had a public - probably couldn't tell the difference. Or, at least, notice the difference. I'm confident there would be one. 

Elon Musk, my old school pal. The worst man on the planet. Happy birthday to me. My birthday wish is that you retire from public life, Elon. And give away some of that fucking horde you couldn't spend in a hundred lifetimes, you fucking monster.