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It was my birthday not too long ago. Happy Birthday to me. Although you were not invited, and therefore cannot independently confirm this, rest assured I had a good time celebrating the date of my entrance into the world. At least, as best as I can remember, since I had quite a bit of Jack Daniels to help me over the rough spots. Birthdays are nice, but I don't really think they're all that important. As a measure of age the birthday is pretty arbitrary and unreliable, considering that a) you're relying on The Adult Conspiracy to tell you when you were born, and b) since people die at all ages, how old you are is really unreliable as an indication of your physical state. Better to poll yourself periodically on the amount of soul-chilling pain you're in and the amount of unusual fluids seeping from your body than to count the candles on your cake. Still, you could argue that Birthdays are as good a time for some introspection and stock-taking as any. If you only pick one day a year to look deep within yourself and evaluate your life, might as well be your birthday—unless, of course, you're like me and spend your birthdays sopping up free drinks and groaning from huge steak dinners bought for you by your foolish, if affectionate, friends and inner-circle members. Of course, being shallow and somewhat dim, I think all this taking-stock and introspection is pretty overrated. Every year I clear some time (wisely, after the boozefest that is my actual birthday) and ponder where I am in life, and every year I come to the same general conclusion: Not much different than the year before. As short as life is, it's changes are usually pretty glacial, barring disaster. If you think about it, you've changed since yesterday, somehow. In some small, almost imperceptible way, you're a different person. You learned something new that will affect your decision-making, or you got burned by something and will alter your behavior to avoid doing it again. Or maybe part of your body just broke down in a tiny way that won't even show up for years—a hairline crack in the old engine block, so to speak. The point is, while you have surely changed in the past 24 hours, I'd bet you'd be hard pressed to point out exactly how you've changed. Microchange is almost invisible. You've got to wait until it collects into Macrochange before you can really see it, and that takes years, if not decades. Me, I don't think I've changed significantly since I was eleven. Does this make me a precociously deep and mature person, or a shallow moron off whom life's lessons slide harmlessly? You can be the judge of that. Or maybe I'm accruing millions of tiny steps towards one major change, perhaps a new evolutionary stage that's never been seen before, and it won't manifest consciously until about fifty years have gone by. Maybe I'm just stunted. Whatever the reason, I think back to when I was eleven, or seventeen, or twenty-two or -five or whatever, and I really can't see much difference. Political diffidence? Check. Physical laziness? Check. Flannel shirts and jeans? Check. Maybe I'm just a simple man, and things like personal growth and development are beyond me. That actually satisfies Occam's Razor as the simplest possible explanation, don't you think? Still, people seem obsessed with change, sometimes. We live in a transient world, and maybe that's all it is: Difficult to ignore change since it's happening all the time around us. But people just don't change that much, that quickly—under normal circumstances. Sure, something dramatic happens, you get put in a metaphorical pressure cooker for a while, anything can happen. You could change overnight, if enough pressure is put on you. Most of us, though, are bottom-feeders, slowly rising—inches a year—into thinner atmospheres, hardly noticing the bulge of our inner pressure. So why is everyone so obsessed with looking back on short periods of time and pondering how much they've changed? Especially since chances are that they haven't changed all that much. It's drama. We all like to think we're important. Special. Our lives are so stressful, so full of difficulty. So amazing for navigating the Job-like existence the Universe has picked out especially for us, to test us. For what, I have no idea. Maybe to be recruited by Robert Preston to pilot a starship against invading aliens. We've been through so much, we certainly have to check every five minutes in order to document the immense and holy changes in ourselves. Ah, yes. It's all clear now, once you factor in The Inner Swine Axiom of Relativity: Everyone's an asshole, especially me. And definitely you. Bitter? Me? Possibly. More likely I am tired of the Universe testing me in my Job-like existence. I mean, haven't I passed the test yet? Where's the keys to my starship? Why haven't I been sucked up into Heaven to begin the good work of torturing sinners for god's Gestapo? Ah, fuck it. You know where to find me. Until next time, I remain Jeff |
August 19, 2003