Forty-nine

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I’ll be forty-nine tomorrow. One year before a very scary birthday.

Almost five decades of sapience (still wish I knew why my vocabulary switched toward the Latinate some months back).

How would I sum it up? Long stretches of ignorance punctuated by moments of insight. Reexamining my sexuality has seemed repeated encounters with confident simplicity. I’d always thought my life full of close self-examination. Self-mockery is an almost secret pleasure.

I don’t much regret that, at least in the abstract, the wise and foolish alike have always flattered themselves with their self-understanding.

Humanly enough I have regrets. I wish I’d read more. More accurately, I wish I’d read more of what I’m reading now: history, literature. I don’t think my life would’ve been better lived, but a greater storehouse of knowledge and images would seem a good in itself. If my sexuality had revealed its full complexity I wouldn’t have necessarily been happier but I’d have had more options. Maybe more failures, certainly more possibilities.

My successes? I’m not dead yet. A small claim. I took more risks than many: crime, criminals, drugs, I was deadly careless with my health. Plenty have been braver and are also alive.

Being alive will have to do. A cheating answer, isn’t it? I own my own used bookshop. While I live not much better than a churchmouse the only person I answer to is myself (and Gordon). And sometimes I find a way to describe my past precisely and honestly. (It doesn’t matter that the words will die with the web pages – I’ll be gone as well.)

Anyway, my private Doomsday Clock moves forward another notch.