look alive

I had breakfast with a friend this morning.  After some comments about my "hipster" bed-head, which was at least legitimate this morning (I mean who has time to shower before a breakfast meeting, and when you're biking, what's the point really?), he handed me a couple articles from Christianity Today, a magazine I rarely, if ever, read.  The articles reflected the stages of our lives: my friend in middle-agedness, myself in the bliss of late twentysomethingness.  

As I ate my biscuits and gravy (I biked remember? So, it's ok), we began talking about life-stages, self-conscious churchy-style hipness, and the judgment that floods each of us, stopping our ability to think clearly like dead leaves stop a storm drain at a street corner.  Perhaps in another 20 years I'll look back on the rest of this post and see it as backed-up rain water mixed with road oil, grime, and debris.  But what the hell.

The "quarter-life-crisis" concept (phenomenon? anomaly?) is already so overexposed and self-conscious (for example: this), sometimes I want to snap my fingers and be in my forties to avoid any sort of guilt-by-association with twentysomethings that couldn't decide their way out of a paper bag.  On the other hand, most people my parents age ("most" cluing us all in to my use of "glittering generalities") are nearing retirement from a job they've never liked, still working, still feeding the monkey, or the rat, or the machine, or the man, or the Wizard of Oz.  One of the articles my friend gave me this morning has the author lamenting about just such a life: his mortgage, college bills looming in the future, and other malaise-effecting realities of middle(american)life.

And I'm beginning to feel like a pong ball jumping back and forth from paddle to paddle, from youthful exuberance and potential delusions, to middle-age realities and potential settling and selling out.  Maybe this is just the transition to true adulthood.  I want a house, but do I need to be saddled with a mortgage? I want my (potential) children to go to college, but do I need to let future tuition payments drive the direction of my life and career?

On the one side are my peers, waiting about for something meaningful to do, something perfect, something to make them feel fulfilled at all times.  On the other side are my progenitors, running about trying to maintain, hoping to have enough for a post-retirement motorhome. And we're all so busy pointing the finger at one side or the other, we don't notice the water rising, the storm drains backing up, and the anniversary of our death passing by, striking one more year off its date planner.  Perhaps some Nada Surfian/Robert Bruceian ontology is in order. Look alive.  See these bones?  Just like we are, you'll be dust.  Death, that bitch, I know she'll get me in the end.

Dust and wind. So, I guess, do what's worth doing.