Last weekend I had an 8 hour round trip to join my Grandpa on his 87th birthday. Word is flying around it may be his last. As much as his situation is better than my Grandma I lost a couple of years ago, I do have to say getting old isn’t for the faint of heart. While Grandma got cancer and spent way too much time in a genuine nursing home suffering, My grandpa is in an apartment complex for the elderly in good health. Yet in some ways it may be more depressing. His good health just means he is in a holding pattern.

As I sat and talked with him, I came to realize nearly all his neighbors had died recently. I began to wonder what it must be like to have lunch for a good buddy one day and bury him a week later. Maybe every once in a while this is part of any of our lives, but for him it is the status quo. It is taken for granted just like getting the paper every morning and the mail every afternoon.

Truth be told, we’ll all be there before we know it. That afternoon, I had half a mind to go out and buy a pack of full flavored Marlboros and bite the filters off. I’d rather crap out from lung cancer at 64 then spent another 20 plus years waiting around for the inevitable. It all just seems horribly depressing.

Time, my friends, marches on. I’m just a few days from 31 and I still don’t know what I want to do when I grow up. I guess the good news is even at this point I’ll have another 34 years to follow that calling. So maybe the pressure isn’t on as much as I convince myself it is. I guess I’m trying to find my niche. I think the world doesn’t encourage you to grow up like it once did. Ask Grandpa’s generation and you’ll see they would be raising middle schoolers at this point in their life with about a third of their mortgage paid off and over a decade at the same job. We update our myspace pages and our blogs. Kids, a mortgage and the same job for more than a couple of years looks more like a trap than an appealing situation.

Maybe we are too well informed.

Growing up is hard work and every time I step up to plate and get ready to swing away I realize the game is fixed. Like it or not we all have the same ending. Some of us just have a little more fun getting there. So while I spend my days going to the gym, replacing bacon with turkey, living smoke-free and barely touching alcohol or caffeine, I wonder what the point is. In reality I’m taking a good deal of joy off these early years to spend a little more time on the back end waiting for the finish line. Poor narcissistic-blogger-man-child.

I am not a beautiful and unique snowflake.


So I’m having my twilight with blogging. It has been a great record of the past few years. For a long time I loved it madly.


Now I’m over it, everyone else seems to be over it and it is impeding my creativity. I could honestly and openly write fiction, but friends would psycho-analyze it. In fact in the past some have. Some are brave enough to do it to my face and others surreptitiously. I could write the candid inner-workings of my soul, but the wrong people could always get their hands on it.


The magic is gone. At least it feels that way. Any day my last transmission will appear on here. Just like your favorite dog growing up that “went to the farm” or your favorite sitcom character, you can pick up the story from here. Perhaps I went on to write the great American novel. Perhaps I’m waist deep in the monotony of suburbia. From here my life will become the ultimate Mad-Lib. Just pick a noun and a verb and away we go.

There’s tragedy in the genes,
I ran the numbers.
A kiss upon the forehead from Hypnos
Darkness…slumber?

Maidens fair, cheveux bruns
Shall I mount a steed?
The imagination burns deep
The Lotus eaters win me over.

There’s a point in life where you have to admit that you don’t have the answers and chances are you aren’t going to find ‘em.

Enlightenment might exist in some distant temple in the Himalayas. I’m thankfully to live in a time and place where I could freely travel to that point of enlightment, but do I have the money or the motivation? Nope.

There in lies the funny truth about life these days. We have a limitless internet, hundreds of television channels, nearly every movie ever made can be rented at the click of a few buttons... yet we are bored. I mean really genuinely bored. OK, I should say I am bored.

I don’t want to be one of those cry baby first world types who complains. I have nothing genuine to complain about. Some days I think if I had something to complain about, I’d feel a little better about things. It just seems amazing to me that a year can pass and I don’t even know it, yet I count down the minutes until I get to leave work and go home or count down the days until the weekend rolls around. 10 seconds after I walk through the door Monday morning I start all over again.

The weird thing is I believe this is the rule rather than the exception. I think we all do this. We should be dancing in the streets that we live in a time and place with top notch health care and limitless entertainment and our biggest problem is most of us eat too much. Our ancestors would kill for this.

Somehow it all falls flat. If it didn’t, then we wouldn’t have dozens of anti-depressants that only make us fatter and more apathetic. Weeeeee………

I don't know how they slipped under my radar, but I'm liking the Rilo Kiley a lot.

I thought the lyrics of this tune were fitting given the holiday season also had a rather famous hanging.

Any chimp can play human for a day. Use his opposable thumbs to iron his uniform, and run for office on election day, fancy himself a real decision maker, and deploy more troops than salt shakers. But it's a jungle when war is made, and you'll panic and throw your own shit at the enemy. The camera pulls back to reveal your true identity. Look, it's a sheep in wolf's clothing. A smoking gun holding ape. Any asshole can open up a museum. Put all of the things he loves on display so everyone could see them. The house, a car, a thoughtful wife ordinary moments in his ordinary life. But if she breaks a smile, she'll give you away 'cause no one wants to pay to see your happiness. No one wants to pay to see your day to day and I'm not buying it either but I'll try selling it anyway. Any idiot can play Greek for a day and join a sorority or write a tragedy and articulating all that pain and maybe you'll get paid. But it's a sin when success complains, and your writers block-it don't mean shit. Just throw it against the wall and see what sticks. Gotta write a hit I think this is it. It's a hit. And if it's not, then it's a holiday for hanging yeah it's a holiday for hanging yeah it's a holiday for hanging yeah it's a holiday for hanging yeah shoo-bop-shoo-bop my baby Any fool can play executioner for a day, and say with fingers pointed in both directions 'he went thataway', It's only a switch or syringe, aww, exempt from eternal sins. But you still wear a cross, and you think you're gonna get in. Ah, but the pardons never come from up-stairs. They're always a moment too late, but it's entertainment keep the crowd on their toes, it's justice, we're safe. It's not a hit, it's a holiday shoo-bop-shoo-bop my baby It's a holiday for hanging, yeah It's a holiday for hanging, yeah It's a holiday for hanging, yeah It's a holiday for hanging, yeah I'm a holiday for hanging, I'm a holiday for hanging, I'm a holiday yeah I'm a holiday for hanging, It's a holiday for hanging, yeah

On the one hand, I think it is sort of sad how easily you can shut down a city these days. Last time I was in Logan, some idiot left a bag unattended in the line to check in. It was just an unclaimed bag laying there. None of us said anything. I think it was an unspoken understanding that if we pointed it out to security officials, the airport would shut down and we’d spend the holiday stuck in the airport. So we all pretended not to see it.

Yes, the thought did enter my mind it could be a bomb or something equally insidious. We all chose to ignore it. Maybe it was a test because eventually the bag disappeared. Perhaps the owner reclaimed it. It could have been a crazy drug swap. Who knows? I guess the moral of the story is we are better to be safe than sorry. Truth be told though, the vast majority of us know the minute we point anything out that is at all remotely suspicious, we’ll be smack in the middle of an overreaction.

Anyone under about 35 with some level of cultural awareness could have immediately pointed out that these “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” signs were probably harmless. In fact Adult Swim has billboards around Boston with basically the same image. I’ve seen these billboards in other places as well. I find it hard to believe someone didn’t say “hey that’s the cartoon guy from Adult Swim!”

I personally don’t get “Aqua Teen Hunger Force.” It seems to me like some hipsters decided it was worthy programming and everyone else just hopped on board the trend. Let’s just hope no one gets the bright idea to put Stewie Griffin cut outs in daycares around the country. If any baby powder got on it, we’d be in the midst of an anthrax scare.

Oi vei!