1/20/03 Midnight PST: Happy birthday to me.

As of ... oh, now, I'm 30 years old. Three decades. 10,957 days (if my math is right, always a dodgy proposition).

Lots of people "feel different" or undergo midlife crises. My wife started hers after she hit 29, and assures me she'll email me the second she's done.

I feel strangely ... nothing.

I haven't accomplished much of what I wanted. I've made mistakes, true, but more often than not I've been waylaid by trusting, sandbagged when every piece of evidence assured me I was secure. As I noted after the Titans lost to Oakland today, "I never really thought they could win, but seeing them out there, for a minute, it kind of planted a seed of hope. If my life has taught me anything, that seed will never bear fruit."

My nihilism and indifference is not new. I've had it, to varying degrees, since I was 14. That was, for those keeping count, sixteen years ago. My misanthropy is old enough to get a driver's license.

Time keeps grinding down on me, and I'm often confronted with a malaise that demands to know why I should bother with much of anything. My old, dear friends Spite and Anger have carried me so far, and they seem fine keeping me moving forward, ever forward, into mortality's gaping maw.

It was O'Brien in 1984 who uttered the words, "there is no hope of any perceptible change in our lifetime," or words to that effect, and I believe it's true more than ever. In the face of a new American monarchy of hereditary exchanges of power and ever-vigilant encroachments on dignity and freedom, it's an uphill climb that can only end in catching a boulder in the face.

But I'm able to climb a few feet higher than my father, he a few feet higher than his sire. That's something. Theoretically.

We'll see how 2003 and my thirtieth year go. Money doesn't seem to be the crisis it once was. Time, my eternal enemy, seems to have fallen on its back and exposed its fleshy underbelly. In the face of lowered expectations of loved ones and immunity to disappointments from the world at large, my heart breaking a little bit more every single one of those ten thousand days, what will I do now?

I don't know yet.

Watch this space. Let's find out together.

Moving ...