Recently posted on Facebook:
Thank you all for the recent birthday wishes – it’s appreciated. It’s a little tough because 2 days after my birthday – the 18th – was the 1st anniversary of my mother’s death, and that’s going to be kind of a thing for the rest of my life now… as some sort of spectral backseat passenger as I drive ever closer to my own certain death. I’m joking and I’m also not – a friend hoped I had a good birthday and I said I had young children sing songs in celebration that I’m getting closer to my impending demise… my dad died two years ago the day before Rohan’s birthday — bearing his name as a middle name (doubled up as ‘William Wolf’). Two stars forever twinned for me now as he never even got a chance to meet him — and my son will never know his — well, *that* grandpa — connected both in birth/death day and in name, and that kid’s birthdays will always be bittersweet to me.
LIFE IS SO GODDAMNED SHORT.
I remember being young and thinking ’33’ was an age that was ‘old’ — not sure why that age was so boiled in my brain – perhaps the religious upbringing that that was how old historically Jesus was when he died, or that was how old Sting was when The Police took off, or Harrison Ford in Star Wars — and now I’ve passed that age up almost 20 years ago. So what am I? Ancient I suppose. And yet I still feel like a 20 year old in mind, when my body and back remind me I’m an idiot (what a joke by the universe that at a time where I’d prefer everything important happening at least at waist high I’ve got an 8, 5 and 2 year old I’ve got to pick up after. “Pick that up for dad, because my back….” is a mantra now).
LIFE IS SO GODDAMNED SHORT.
You know it was 34 years ago I graduated high school. Insane — and yet I know that older people are thinking ‘pfft… a baby’. It’s 30 years since I’ve been in a band and yet — sadly – that’s still like one of the highlights of my life. I wish I had pursued music more as a career rather than the way I fell into the more ‘reasonable’ computer programming because of something I felt my parents would accept more…. I always thought ‘oh there’ll be more time’ — and time slowly sped up…
I have a theory about the human perception of time speeding up from when you’re a kid and 5 minutes is a tough wait to where years are blasting by – the brain has just experienced / absorbed / filtered more time as a percentage. Duh.
You know what’s weird? The same amount of time: from now to the Ramones, the Ramones to the before World War II! Hell we’re past the hundred year anniversary of World War I. It’s just weird man. Stranger still that the same music is still pertinent today – that kids today will listen to the Ramones, but I doubt kids during the punk era were listening to the Glenn Miller Band.
For people having problems in their relationships, marriages, children, what have you: forgive, forget, transcend. None of it matters. The ego is an illusion, we’re all the same frightened and hurt animals. Do your best to be the activist in your own life to fix things.
I wanted to be an artist: drawing first, painting, then music, acting. I was in plays in high school, first college part I tried out for I was Tony in West Side Story – got to be the voice of Captain America for Marvel for a time (though all that was when Marvel was going bankrupt – I should’ve stuck it out). I have been unbalanced in my right brain / left brain.
Anyway, I’m going to eat some cereal now and think about what’s to come. Wish me luck.
