I write more in my dreams than in actual life. Every night I compose from among an array of hard hitting rants against society, deep love letters, apologies to ex-girlfriends, path breaking treatises, crime thrillers and more. Choose your night and wake me up. I will give you the next big web series idea.
Nothing gets published. As obvious.
But here I am on the threshold of turning 40. Wait... does that word have two "h"s or one? Never mind, I am not a grammar Nazi. Or a spell checker. Is a spell checker a subset of grammar Nazi? So yes, I must turn 40. Half life if I was radioactive. My target is to reach 78, so I am actually past half life. But who celebrates a 39th birthday with the fanfare of a blog post? So here I am.
To publish some thoughts before I turn 40. Or the stuff that I dream. I am making it sound like I do LSD or meth or something every night.
Now do I have any ideas on how to make a literary splash before my landmark birthday? Do I publish some sage advice for my offspring on my birthday? No, that may be something I would do on their birthday, if I considered my advice important enough, which I don't. Actually, there is no plurality in my next generation. But as and when my 8-month old son grows up enough to read this, he would be proud to note that I was doing okay on pronouns back in the days.
The thing is I am not one to make a splash. Is that any way to lead a life? Where's the drive, where's the ambition, you say? Where's the will to be famous? To be remembered? Is this the advice you want to give to a teenager? This just seems grossly irresponsible as a father figure, a middle aged man of any respectable standing in society.
Did you picture that middle aged man? What picture did you visualise? What would Dall-E say? I think I was always 40, but not in the way you think. Yes, I am grumpy in the mornings, I have a pot belly and my back aches at every opportunity but my hair is mostly black and my hairline does not recede, I don't talk about insurance and real estate and investments, I don't even own a house or even a car to tick the traditional boxes and I don't have control over every single thing in my life.
Sounds happy go lucky at 25? So why 40? Because I am the boring guy. The guy who attends every party and stays till the end but does nothing memorable. The guy who commands respect in professional life but is no star who gets promoted out of turn. The guy who wants to eat less and exercise more but never finds the discipline for it. The guy who will climb the first 8000 feet of a 9000 feet mountain but will choose not to summit because the last 1000 feet is just too slippery. The guy... you get the drift. I hope. I am running out of allegories.
In short, I have never been a risk taker. I have always run from confrontation. I have always been lazy - spoiler alert - if you never noticed the name of the website. So I have enjoyed the fountain of youth - which sounds yucky on hindsight - with a certain buffer of safety, never veering too far away from the median, always dousing fires instead of reveling in the burn. A more middle aged take on life if you will.
So what's the point? The point being, because I was always 40 and still am, I don't feel like I have aged over the last 20 years. I feel just that young or that old. As they say, age is just a number. Or the number of heavy breaths you take after 5 minutes on the football pitch. Who knows, maybe I will take a few risks from hereon, reverse aging is not that bad a concept. Till then, I will keep smiling and taking a few sips of, what else, whisky, and nod at you from the corner of the room, when we meet.
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