I'm 43 today.
I've really hit a wall about what I wanted to write about for this momentous occasion. Birthdays are just...mehf. I come from Patton Oswalt's stance on the matter: when you're an adult, a celebration once a decade until you're 90, then a slap on the ass the other nine birthdays. Is it a sign of a depressed personality? Almost certainly; I'll own it. I'm part of that last "great" generation of white men who were raised to believe that no one really gives a shit about your feelings, and that you should do something that really "matters" if you think you should be celebrated. No wonder I'm fucking depressed. What a hell of a way to be raised.
I've often thought about musicians dying young as I've grown older. I once thought I wouldn't make it past 22 (Buddy Holly, Darby Crash). 1999 was such a shit year, having sold a big chunk of my record collection, split up with the first love of my life, and moved off to a college I'd fail out of within a year. I slept with a pistol under a pillow for months, begging myself not to use it. I blew past the 27 Club. I got married, finally got a degree, and bought a house. Within another five years, most of that would be gone, the only thing left another several years of student debt. I hit 40, and I felt like I finally had the world by the balls. I lived in a place I loved, with a woman I adored, making a living wage for the first time ever. I even took a real staycation for the first time ever. I returned to work three days later, and got laid off. I haven't had a stable job since.
Can you see why I'm not high on my birthday? There are times where it feels like it's the herald of a new load of misery.
Augustus Pablo was 44 when he died of a collapsed lung in 1999. There are two ways I look at this. One is that I'm almost as old as he was, and that I'll never make a work of art as great or lasting as "East of the River Nile". The man made the melodica sound as cool as Coltrane's sax or Watt's bass. What can I possibly do to measure up? The other is that I'm still here; I can still discover the genius in a piece of art like this. It's in the discovering that, even when everything else feels like it's shit, I find the momentum to keep moving. Crate digging can make a bad day good, a good day great. I found a Canadian cassette of this a couple years ago that had never been entered on Discogs; at 19 cents, it's probably one of my favorite thrift store finds from the past few years.
Depression is an anchor that weighs me down every day. I take medicine and participate in therapy and work on myself every day and it's a fucking drag even on the best days. Yeah, even on a day like today, it can be tempting to let myself drown. It's music like this that helps me float, sometimes even surf in life.
