Birthdays

The most remarkable thing about a birthday at my age is that it's a kind of official marker of continued survival. I've been living what Raymond Carver called "gravy" years for some time now. Both my parents dropped dead instantly, and if I did the same five minutes from now it wouldn't surprise me, nor would I particularly regret it. Not that I'm suicidal. I just realize how damn lucky I've been already, so why get greedy? I think of survival as having time to finish the current writing project but every time I finish one, I immediately start another, so that line goes on into eternity -- or rather, to whenever it is that good fortune finally catches up with me. While I'm still around, I try to have as good a time as possible, which generally means spending as much time as possible in the creative world and as little as possible in the world of realpolitik. I'm not a masochist. I'd like to live long enough to actually retire and settle into a neighborhood where I can walk everywhere and don't own a car and in fact don't own much of anything, into a rhythm where an afternoon walk for a cup of coffee is a Big Deal. I feel like I'm nearing the end of my writing life, which is to say, I've been writing for so long that not much excites me any more. I've been easily bored all my life, which has made me adventurous and prolific, always trying new things, but also ends up leaving me exhausted without energy to conquer, or try to conquer, new horizons -- and bored with the old ones. Fortunately, I'm excited about COFFIN, the current book, because it's peopled with eccentric old farts and will be filled with, if I do it right, dark social and political satire. In a sense, it feels like a swan song. After that, however, I don't expect to become silent but to shift gears once again because I am getting close in my music studies now, perhaps less than a year away, when I can jump into my ideas for music drama with focused front-burner energy. So if I still hang around for a while, I expect to stop writing "prose" or "scripts" and start writing some bastardized form of musical drama, writing the narrative and music both. I expect to die with my boots on.

But probably not today.