30!

I don't have a lot of stuff to work with yet for thirty though I'm intrigued by the suggestion that I should project my life into the future. You remember turning thirty three and accepting the national book award...

You remember waking up in a gutter in Mexico at sixty seven. Anyhow, I suppose that would just be fiction writing and as everyone knows, you can't make any money doing that. So, if you'll excuse me I have a couple more things to say before I drift off into decrepitude. This will probably take three days to get through, and I'll probably remain thirty for the duration. It's not nearly as exciting as aging a year every day, but I thought it might be worthwhile to actually reflect on this little project I've been churning out each night.

Tonight, I want to talk about some things that I forgot. Firstly, my first memory ever comes from Mrs. Lake's house in Merced when I was one, perhaps two. I remember playing with one of those toys that is comprised of a series of wires that you can push various shapes around on. They were pretty much ubiquitous in dentists offices during the eighties, but I think they've gone out of style. I wasn't crazy about Mrs. Lake. She wasn't my mother, or anyone really significant. So why exactly did my mind cling to that? Strange.

I already wrote about the small cul-de-sac that I grew up on, but what I didn't mention was how enormous it seemed to me as a child. It's comprised of exactly six houses. But, I can remember the people who lived in five out of the six houses. Now I live in a big city and I know exactly one person's name on my entire block. Ruth. Things were a bit different when I was younger. You were allowed to walk home from school in the second grade in the company of just another friend.

I remember very clearly singing to Lionel Richie records while standing on top of chairs in our house. Lionel Richie is a bad ass. I blame this whole scenario on my older sister who took advantage of my gullibility and had me belting out crap like this from an early age.
">

For a period of time I liked songs like this. Again, I can only blame my sister.

">

I also briefly felt that the theme for the Robin Hood movie was written on my behalf by Mr. Bryan Adams. I was fairly certain that their was someone out there who was worthy of feeling my enduring love as exemplified in the magnificent bridge. I may not have listened to it as much as "How Do You talk to an Angel," but I was definitely pushing it. And why? Because it's hard to be young, and it's easy to forget that when you're old. It's easy to reminisce and create some sort of magical time in your life that never actually existed. I suppose that's why everyone (almost) loves Catcher in the Rye because in many ways, being young sucks, precisely because you are young. You have no conception of how good you actually have it. "Youth is wasted on the Young" George Bernard Shaw kind of beat me to this point and did it in a much pithier manner. However, he didn't have a magnificent song to drive home his point like I do now. But no, Mr. Bryan Adams has denied you and me and the rest of the world the life changing power of his song. Ergo; I'm forced to paste the link below, which has about a zero percent chance of being utilized unless you really want your soul to be touched by music, then you might. You might paste that in your tool bar and fall in love with Mr. Adams and the stoic Kevin Costner all over again.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGoWtY_h4xo&feature=related

I forgot to mention my favorite moment playing basketball. It was in the summer before my junior year of high school, and I was coming down the right lane on a fast break and my now aged and decrepit, then young and vital, friend Josh was trailing a bit on the left, and I threw it off the backboard just hard enough and to his side, and when I looked up he was hanging on the rim. I'd like to think the fact that my favorite moment in basketball was a pass says something good about me. However, it might just be pointing out my lack of hops and enviousness over people who could dunk. Who knows.

Other things I forgot. My co-workers were kind enough to give me a birthday card today with He-Man (what overwhelming masculinity, he and man), and I realized that I'd forgotten totally about Orko I'd also forgot almost entirely about Cringer, and had only vague memories of the Battlecat. I think I spent a number of years secretly hoping that this was the year that mom was going to break down and get us a Battlecat. Sure it might eat us in our sleep, but, it might not.

And no, we've no earthly clue what the hell it is that he won't do, but we do know that he'll include hot models (at the time) who only lip synch in his videos. And for that, I think we'll always remember Meatloaf fondly.

">


You forgot to mention a thousand different things and hundreds of different people.

On the day you turn thirty you are surprised by the number of people who wish you a happy birthday, or who gather in the small office where you work to eat ice cream cake. You think, still in that way of a shy five year old, that some mistake has been made and that they don't know the real you.Or were perhaps just excited by the cake or reminded by facebook that you still exist. It's strange to think of how infrequently some people who seemingly left indelible marks on your life cross your mind, but how you can conjure up those wires in Mrs. Lake's house, or the stench of coffee on the breath of your kindergarten teacher. Memory is a strange and twisted think like that. Apparently, (and of course I realize all statistics are made up on the spot) we remember negative things for ten times as long as we remember positive things. So, that c- stuck with me, the misspelled encyclopedia, the struggles in algebra. I do not remember any of my other grades from third grade, but I'm almost certain they were better. I remember the slights, the things that I could have done. Why does the mind persist in this way? Perhaps that's why it's so nice to watch television, put thoughts to rest. The reality is, that today has been a great day, and the chief reason for that has been the number of fantastic people who I've come across at different points in my life and my wonderful family and adopted family. It's not so bad to be thirty.


In your thirtieth year you listen to this song. And yes, their remain a shi- load of things that you haven't done or haven't done well. Luckily, you're hoping that you've still got a few years to amend some of those shortcomings, though not all. That would be a hopeless task.

">

End of Elegy for a Silk Tree

You remember coming home from school that Wednesday afternoon that you decided that the tree didn’t have any sort of soul. That it was just a thing among things that would pass out of existence like any other. You rested your bike carelessly against the trunk, the front wheel abrading the trunk like a bird’s harsh beak. You placed your foot in the familiar crook, hoisted yourself up, and began to climb. Your hands moved so quickly across the bark that you did not feel the thousands of scars of birds flown south for winter. That day, you were not content to sit in the crook of the tree and let it lull into that place outside of time, outside of obligation, scissors and Elmer’s. You wanted to climb beyond the branches, to break through the dying pods, the bowing leaves, and look down into the yard, your whole world until a scant few weeks ago. The sky was gunmetal. From up there you could see the spate of parallel holes that you’d put in the dirt next to your house while digging for dinosaur bones, chipping away at the foundation of the house. You could see the hole in the fence, two broken boards leaning on top of one another, where you and the neighbor kids used to sneak through. A rosebush is beginning to close the hole, the roses themselves, pressing through the opening, wilting in the late stages of Autumn. You could see from there, the green shrubs and birch trees that shrouded the tiny fort you played in until a few months ago. A place that you, and your siblings in their own time had marked with streams of yellow urine shot off into a space between the bushes. And the blackberry bushes, that grew tall, above the low fence line, above the black power lines, bent in a slight breeze, that dropped rich fruit into your greedy fingers.
From here you could see everything that had remained hidden in that vortex of time. As the sun was setting, you remember, or think you remember, everything around turning the exact same shade of blue, a cruel sort of uniformity that made you feel, for the first time, a kind of sadness that cut you down to the bone. Your mother was calling from the distance to remind you to wash your hands before dinner. And you climbed down the maze of branches that lined the smooth trunk of the tree and went inside. There, you turned on the television and began to watch something that sometimes made you laugh.