Hours of Daylight – 11:07

The days get longer and longer and, best of all, this morning a light rain shower came with the thick smell of spring. I love that smell, it brings me back to some very early childhood place i’ve otherwise completely forgotten. Aside from that one happy moment this morning when i walked outside for the first time everything else is rife with conflict.

I fear if you, my loyal reader, were to pull your copy of Webster’s off the shelf and turn to “Midlife Crisis” you may see my picture. I’m there. I’m the guy in midlife deeply worried about what do next. First, i should explain that i never expected to be born. “Well, duh! That’s obvious. Nobody expects to be born.” Right, but what i’m really saying is my parents never expected me to be born. And while they did the best they could with their limited child-rearing talents the fact they never planned to be in the situation they were in was always there in the room with us.

Next there was that period in High School where i, for about a year, actively tried to kill myself. Well, not as actively as some, but there were drugs, alchohol, reckless driving, hanging from all manner of attach points backstage and up in the catwalks of several Long Island high school auditoriums with no safety cables. But i barely got so much as a nosebleed.

Suffice to say i never expected to reach 42 years of age. 42! I can’t get my head around that! I certainly don’t feel 42. What’s possibly worse is i have very little to show for my 42 years on this planet. Basically have a pretty good supply of mediocre photographs, a long trail of memories that become foggier and foggier with each passing day, and my relationship with my wife.

My parents both died in their 80’s. They were, for the most part, healthy until right near the end. But all that does is remind me i’m solidly at the half-way mark of my alloted time on this earth. I don’t regret not having children. Annette and i agreed over 20 years ago neither of us were well suited to raising children. We’re quite good at raising cats. I have a feeling we’d be good raising other animals too, but i’ve yet to put that to the test.

So. What comes next? I see no clear path. Conflict and self-doubt rules my days.

The standard question at this point would be “well, what do you want?”

Oddly enough i do have an answer for that: I would like to live somewhere with Annette where it would just be the two of us and our animals and maybe some friends. Our contact with the outside world would be by choice, not by necessity. We are, in the words of Kurt Vonnegut writing in his latest, most pessimistic, book, “a fragile survival unit.” In an earlier book he might have called us a duprass which is a karass made of two members. But either way she and i draw no strength or support from what family we have and find connections with friends tenuous at best.

She and i largely agree with something a friend once said: “we’re members of the ‘just fucked’ generation.” We’re of that age were we basically missed everything. Too young to be hippies, not properly motivated to be yuppies, too old to be “gen x.” The list goes on and on. She and i feel we were just born at the wrong time and for the wrong reasons.

So. What comes next? No idea.

I mean, it’s not like i’ve not tried to do different things. The problem is nothing has “stuck.” When i was younger all i wanted was to be a pilot. However, my largely hapless father mandated i go to college before considering anything else. So, to college i went. While there flying fell by the wayside. After college making money took center stage. Also two disparate events soured me on flying. One was the tale of a high school friend who was orders of magnitude smarter and more dedicated than i could ever be. He had gone NROTC all the way…. and instead of flying jets or even rotorcraft ended up being a cargo handler on some navy ship. He’d made it through flight school, but something happened and, as far as i knew, he never flew again. The other friend i knew had finished his private license and was moving on through the different certifications. He explained having the license largely sucked in that it cost tons of money to get and to keep and it meant everybody wanted to fly somewhere. He felt like the guy in town with the pickup truck and everybody had stuff to haul.

Years later i tried for a private pilot’s license, but 2/3rds of the way through i simply got bored. Plus the costs were draining the bank account. I ended the lessons without finishing. Then i though maybe i should try a more structured, college-level aproach to flying. I had the undergrad degree… i could to to Embry Riddle, pay for the training with student loans, and come out with an instructor’s ticket. But that crashed and burned after i drove all the way from New York to Daytona Beach for an admissions interview. The “counselor” i spoke with told me to forget flying and go into management. He proposed i do no flight time at all but go straight into management. I argued “all i want to do is fly.” But his position was the being a pilot was a sucker’s gig. Management was where i wanted to be. I turned around and drove back to New York.

So now, 20 years later, i still don’t have a pilot’s license, and i’m looking at a return to print production as a means to pay my bills. Conflict, conflict, conflict.