(Written last night.)

It's my 40th birthday today; and much like a lapsed Jew at Passover, I have no real plans to celebrate it this year, other than to sorta vaguely acknowledge it for the sake of tradition. Or, I mean, I'm doing at least a little celebrating -- tonight for example I'm down in Hyde Park hanging out with my friend Carrie and her twin five-year-olds, and then tomorrow my old friends Tom and Jude and Kate are taking me out for cocktails in Andersonville and then a comedy show at the Lakeshore Theatre. No, I mean that I'm skipping the usual big festivities that often come with such decade-related milestones (for example, the drunken nightmare which was my 30th birthday and resulting giant surprise party -- whoo man, let's not even get into that night), in that I'm still not at a place in my life I feel worth celebrating yet. It's not exactly that I'm sad about how my life is going these days, just that I'm not exactly happy with it either; I guess if anything, you could call it a classic case of melancholy, a certain sort of quiet, existential sadness over knowing that things in your life are not as good as they could be, knowing that with each passing year, yet another couple of things you had always wanted to accomplish become things that you will never now be able to accomplish.

Like, I've been thinking about the following a lot this week, of how it's been years and years now since I've had any kind of experience I would categorize as legitimately joyful, that kind of simple and exuberant joyfulness that I used to experience regularly when I was younger; about the best it gets for me anymore is the subdued, mostly internal satisfaction of finishing another book review or podcast episode, of having a nice neighborhood walk on a warm day. But, and this is the important part, I don't mind that so much, and in fact mostly brought about such a situation by choice, after living a very rollercoasteresque high-drama life throughout most of my twenties and early thirties, and eventually completely burning out on it. So how then should I feel about it, as I finally reach the age where I really, really can in no way ever refer to myself as 'young' again? Part of me is sad that those things about me have slowly died over the last decade -- my passionate side, my chaos-embracing side, the very parts of me that caused all the drama in the first place but also caused a lot of good things, all my old books and all my old tours and a whole lot more. But then another part of me, a bigger part of me, is so fucking glad these traits are getting slowly killed off, and in fact it's this glad side of me that's responsible for the deaths of these traits in the first place. So how then to feel about it all, when all is said and done?

I suppose this is simply part of being a grown-up, of learning how to reconcile these clashing emotions, learning how to let go of your youth without being ashamed of your youth either, how to grieve the loss of youth without ever wanting it back in your life again. Although granted, in my particular case, my particular life is just a little more under the normal curve of this stuff than the typical 40-year-old, with a certain amount of basic issues whose continual subpar statuses make me legitimately upset; for example, I still have barely any revenue coming into my life these days (I live off less than $10,000 a year, and have done so every year since 2002), a fact that becomes more and more frustrating with every passing year. And that prevents me from dating, or at least dating in the way I want; because that's another decision I've made in middle-age, that I'm through for good with casual dating, and will not be going out on dates at all anymore unless it's with someone I think I might actually have a serious future with, even if that's in theoretical terms only. And this means a sane woman, a smart woman, someone my age and with her own career and her own successes and her own life away from mine; and such women simply don't want to go out with flighty arts administrators who make less than $10,000 a year, and who still live in a shitty studio apartment filled with half-broken thrift-store furniture. They simply don't, which of course is what makes them sane and smart to begin with.

So maybe this too is part of the not-sad sadness I'm experiencing these days, of knowing that most of these situations arise by deliberate choice; that if I wanted to, I could go out tomorrow and find some trainwreck like my last girlfriend, some hot crazy 25-year-old who's impressed merely by a middle-aged man still pursuing a creative profession, someone who has absolutely no problem with fucking a man like this for a couple of months for no other reason than that. The world is full of easily impressed, sexually liberal 25-year-olds, and if I wanted I could spend the rest of my life in a series of dysfunctional six-month relationships with nobody but them; but this isn't what I want, and what I do want is right now beyond my reach, and so I choose to have no love life at all until I can finally reach what it is that I truly want. And so I can't exactly be sad about any of this, although for sure I do regularly experience the kind of loneliness and horniness that can only come from...four and a half years of celibacy now. Jesus, it always sounds so much worse when I actually write it down.

It's like this with a lot of things in life that frustrate me these days; for another example, how if a true financial emergency really did arise in my life, I know that tomorrow I could close down my arts center and devote all my waking hours instead to finding some cushy soul-killing creative-class corporate job, and know almost for a certainty that by a year from now I'd be pulling in at least $50,000 a year and have health insurance again. But as long as there isn't such a financial emergency going on in my life, as long as I can tolerate living off less than $10,000 a year, I'm choosing these days to deliberately do so, so that I can devote all my attention instead to CCLaP and trying to make it into a legitimate career on its own, and simply avoid the soul-killing corporate job altogether. And so it is with me not owning a car, and so it is with me not owning a credit card, and so it is with me not owning a house; these are all complications I'm deliberately trying to avoid having in my life as long as humanly possible, so that I can instead pursue the things I'm much more interested in, things like inner happiness and a consistent set of morals, a sense that what I'm doing with my time is important, a sense that I'm not one of the great unwashed masses blithely tripping my way through life, filling my time with useless middle-class trinkets until my inevitable pointless death.

I've conversed now online with so many fellow middle-agers, so many of them, who went through (or are going through) such a more serious midlife crisis than me, precisely for the reasons I'm mentioning; not the annoying little temporary stresses of too little money or not enough sex, but the soul-crushing stresses of being stuck in a loveless marriage, of a nightmare job they can't afford to walk away from, because of kids they never really wanted in the first place and an underwater mortgage now hanging around their neck like a giant fucking dead albatross. I myself am not in this position, and for that I am eternally grateful, and for that I will happily put up with the much more moderate stresses of simply being poor, of simply being horny sometimes. The older I get, the more I come to understand just how important these things are for overall adult happiness -- a sense that one is doing something purposeful with one's life, a sense that they are with a person who makes them truly satisfied -- and I think these are things it takes a lot of people literally until middle age to truly appreciate (it certainly did with me), and who in the meanwhile filled their own youths up with a bunch of overwhelming consumerist commitments, who leveraged themselves up to their eyeballs and are now trapped in this endless downward spiral of debt and kids and unhappy marriages and debt and kids and unhappy marriages. And that's why I think so many people have so-called "midlife crises" to begin with, and why these crises so often manifest themselves in these terrible, destructive ways, like affairs and family abandonment and more.

So like I said, I'm left with mixed emotions about it all here on my 40th birthday -- a happiness over my life not being worse than it is, but an acknowledgement that a not-miserable life is different than a life worth celebrating. As mentioned, it leaves me at the end feeling what I supposed you'd call melancholy, a term I'm coming to realize that one simply cannot appreciate until one gets a little older, until a person finally goes through the kind of profound sadness that they think is going to kill them, and then pops out the other side without actually dying. It's not exactly the most joyful way to spend a milestone birthday, but I suppose it'll have to do.