I come to you from 40 years of age.
That’s right, baby- four fucking zero.
I turned 40 August 11th, and I gave it a little while to set in, but I’ve gotta tell you, so far I feel exactly the same. It feels like just another day in the life.
To other people though, it seems that saying you’ve turned 40 is a lot like announcing that you’ve got terminal cancer of the asshole.
People ask me, “Happy birthday, how old are you now?”
“40.”
“HOLY SHIT!”
You can actually see some people flinch when I tell them.
It doesn’t matter how you look or feel; in our collective consciousness that number 40 is a turn for the worst on that long, dark, dirt road to dead.
It’s something engrained in us.
We’re programmed by our society to freak out about certain milestones.
I remember about 10 years ago I was talking to a friend and she was turning 30 and when I talked to her about it she was in tears. She just couldn’t get over this new number that she had to wear around.
Meanwhile she had so much shit going for her; she was healthy, living in America, had good friends, and was very attractive. It was literally the prime of her existence, and she couldn’t be more miserable.
In her eyes that number 30 was like a gigantic evil boulder suspended above her head by a creaking rope, and with every day that went by it crept lower and lower towards it’s ultimate goal of crushing her head.
Now, I don’t “look” or “feel” like the average 40 that I see because I work out constantly and take a fuck load of supplements (including hormone replacement therapy) to keep my body healthy - but the reality is no matter how you slice it, I’m fucking 40.
On one hand our perceptions of what’s possible at an older age have definitely been changed by modern athletes that compete at the highest level WAY later than they did decades in the past because of the advances in science and nutrition. For example, one of the baddest motherfuckers on the planet, the UFC heavyweight champion Randy Couture is 44 years old, baseball’s homerun king Barry Bonds is 43, and boxing’s light heavyweight champion of the world and one of the best pound for pound fighters alive, Bernard Hopkins is 42. When I was 15 a 40-year-old athlete might as well be dead.
“40 is the new 30!” Whatever the fuck that means.
I think we’ve all got this weird idea of people that somehow a 60-year-old man and a 20-year-old man are different things, but they’re not. A 60-year-old man is nothing but a 20-year-old man that survived.
I mean there certainly is a difference in the way you carry yourself with age, and I’m most certainly better at being “me” now than I was when I was 20, but that’s just really a matter of getting more comfortable socially, and accumulating more information and applying it to the matters in my life. Understanding myself better, developing a better personal philosophy, etc.
What I’m really trying to say though, is that at the end of the day, when absent of outside influence, when I’m thinking with feeling and no words – whatever the real “me” is, it remains exactly the same. That’s not something I would have guessed when I was younger. I just thought somehow “I” would be different.
I always thought that by the time I got to be the respectable age of 40, maybe politics would somehow make sense to me.
No such luck.
I’m just as baffled as to how such a goofy system like this could be in place now as I was when I was 20.
Now that I’m actually of an acceptable age to be a politician, it makes even LESS sense. Now I hear these fucking people talk their crazy talk, and I realize that some of them are actually my age. When I was 20, they were 20, and now here they are on some weird fucking talk show sitting around with a bunch of other dudes around my age, wearing ties and uncomfortable shoes, talking about how important it is to put a stop to gay marriage.
I always think, “who the fuck is that guy hanging out with?” I mean, besides other closet homos, of course.
There’s nothing wrong with being gay, don’t get me wrong – but when I see a guy on TV and he starts connecting gay people in love with “ruining families,” I automatically picture that guy scuffing up those shiny shoes on a piss stained men’s room floor, breathing the sour smell of urinal hockey pucks and other people’s shit though his nose because his mouth is filled with a stranger’s hog.
As a matter of fact, SO many conservative politicians get caught blowing dudes, that I’m starting to think that maybe they’re ALL gay.
From Mark Foley to Ted Haggard to Jeff Gannon to Larry Craig - maybe that’s why they’re really against gay marriage; they don’t want their bitch getting any of their cash.
I hear ya, playa. I ain’t hatin’.
One of the craziest things about politicians is that they all have writers, and that doesn’t even bother us.
We don’t even really get to know what “they” think, because everything “they” say has been carefully planned and scripted in advance by a team of experts. They just slip on those shiny shoes and repeat what’s written.
Why do we still allow that? I mean, these aren’t fucking late night talk show hosts we’re talking about, they’re people positioning themselves to become the commander in chief of the greatest military machine ever known. Shouldn’t we have a better idea of how their brains really work?
I say we should forbid them from having writers, and have a webcam on them 24 hours a day to makes sure they don’t cheat. That, and force them to sit down and write a blog every day telling us how they feel about the world.
Could you just imagine how awesome Bush’s blog would be to read? How about with no spell check?
Another thing that freaks me out about political speeches is why is it that we still accept that weird, fake way of talking?
Could you imagine if someone tried to talk to you one on one the way the president addresses the nation? Why is it OK to talk like that just because you’re talking to a bunch of people?
I think the whole fake aspect of it is really probably just some left over shit from back when they had to address a large crowd with no microphone. You couldn’t speak in a conversational tone back then, because there were hundreds of people gathered to hear you talk, and if you spoke in a normal tone most of them wouldn’t be able to hear a fucking word you said. So politicians, much like stage actors playing loud to the back of the room, learned how to say things in short, loud, meaningful bursts to allow for as many people as possible to take it all in. It became a pattern, and once a pattern is set, we tend to keep it around for a long time.
One of the more shocking realizations that I’ve come to be aware of in this fairly long life, is how much of the direction of our lives just revolve around following patterns, regardless of how silly they are.
Once we’ve got a groove carved, that’s where we follow unless something radical shifts us off course.
I mean, if you look at it objectively, although there’s certainly massive evidence of human technological progress over the last hundred years or so, comparatively speaking human social progress hasn’t really changed all that much.
I mean yeah, women can vote, and slavery is illegal now, but the hard, retarded facts about humans are still concrete; we still have war, we still have massive corruption in our government, we still have bad words, and we still take comfort in fairy tales.
Right now the problems we as humans have in the world all revolve around the same basic needs that we’ve had for thousands of years; we need to control the resources so that “we” and the team “we” are on, can survive in comfort. At one time it was fighting over fertile lands and herds of animals, then it was shiny metal and beautiful women, and now it’s literally the blood of the earth.
A fierce battle to see who gets to suck off the main vein, and the blood of the earth gets used as fuel to power the very machine that poisons it.
Sometimes I think that the only thing that’s going to alter this fucked up direction that we humans are traveling in is the advent of some sort of technology that you could have never guessed would exist. Something so insane that it radically shifts the way we interact with this dimension, or even removes us from the physical boundaries of it. An idea so crazy that until it’s invented, it wouldn’t even be something thought of in science fiction. Much like the internet is today.
I mean, if you look back on what they were capable of on star trek; they were able to break down human beings, several at a time into particles and transfer them down to another fucking planet - but nobody ever dreamed that you could have all of the information in the entire world accessible wirelessly on some small glass screen that you keep in your pocket. They thought of warp speed, but they never dreamed of an iphone. They didn’t even have cameras or cool ring tones on their little walkie-talkies. Their shit was straight ghetto.
There could be some new discovery right around the corner that we couldn’t possibly imagine now, and it could change every single thing as we know it, forever.
It could possibly be a time machine, or maybe an actual portal to another dimension that the whole world can plug into.
A god switch…
Sounds like nutty stoner talk, right?
Of course it does, but if you look at what some scientists are up to right now it starts to seem a little more possible. Even though it doesn’t get much coverage in the daily news and people don’t talk about it like they talk about gay politicians or coke snorting actresses, there is some CRAZY fucking shit going on right now.
How about these particle colliders? They’re in the middle of putting together two of the largest, craziest fucking machines ever conceived by science. Just how big is that? How about 25 fucking MILES big. A gigantic machine that smashes electrons and positrons at insane speeds in an effort to figure what the fuck mass really is.
The only problem; it might create black holes. But I wouldn’t sweat it. I can’t see how that could possibly go wrong, can you?
Maybe that’s the real human “race” - technology vs. the stupid.
Maybe this world is so irreconcilably fucked up that the real race isn’t to see who controls the resources, but rather a race between the destructive motivations behind war, fascism and propaganda, and the ambitions of the human imagination and technology - which ironically need money and resources to fund it.
Maybe the real race is to find and invent the god switch before the dopey territorial apes in charge of highly sophisticated weapons that they couldn’t possibly have invented on their own, wipe 90% of the life off the planet and the whole process has to start again from scratch.
Maybe that’s what December 21st, 2012 is all about?
Just a little over 5 years left, bitches. Live it up!
To wrap things up, here’s a little video of my birthday show, thanks to everyone that was there at the show to share it with me!
