Digest our dinner, a bathroom scale read
~ once the candles are out, then what?
Some days are a celebration.
Others, a reckoning.
There is no cure for the common birthday, and this was both.
We might make noise, blow out candles, and bask in attention. Or hide out in a dark corner until the thunderstorm passes, weeping alone. Or having leftover dessert for breakfast …
When the room clears, or we departed a restaurant table (fantastic meal at Big Fish last night with SB), a drive home under a truly beautiful/ugly threatening sky …
It’s time to ask outload, with a whisper or a scream, what’s the scheme, what’s the theme, what’s the meme going to be?
And what comes next?
There is no owner’s manual for being this human, or your human. Nobody knows, nobody can tell us because it’s freakishly effing difficult to tell ourselves.
Not this human anyway.
And I’ve got none of those factory-recall notice to have a faulty part fixed, none of that - on my own, going my own way like a Fleetwood Mac tune, I’m here, now, and asking my brain, gut and the universe for guidance.
No maintenance schedule or flashing red hubris dashboard light reminds me when to check my ambition, swap out bad habits, or top up my courage with winter-weight 10-W-30.
There is no dipstick to check our life levels or if change is required.
It’s intuitive self-listening, not self-talk.
If there were some magical diagnostic tool, by now it would be an app connected to an implant somewhere between between groin and head, in some midpoint between puberty and perception, clutching my Viagra prescription pulled from a dusty empty toy drawer.
It might read something like:
have an annual check-up, have a birthday, and take three days to really live it. The day before, the day itself, the day after
each one feels different; anticipation, immersion, reflection.
But then what?
Exactly.
The moment passes. Balloons either burst or sag like a wrinkled scrotum. Music fades with the My Way lyrics resonating like ripples on sand on a beach as if Frank was still on that stage a Radio City, his last live performance and Carla was with me.
Today’s alarm goes off: only thing left is whatever we can carry forward.
Everything else, left behind.
Birthdays should be more than nostalgia.
Springboards!
Or trampolines for bounce …
One obvious reminder each year, that we’re still here.
Part gift, part nudge, so we can push harder, fix what we’ve been avoiding, dream for a day without the old limitations on our expectations.
Stepping into a year called the beginning of my future, without dragging the baggage, that I’m dragging along.
This isn’t about candles or cake.
It’s about permission.
Permission to start something now.
Permission to believe this year can be the best one yet.
Startin’ now, startin’ here, and I’m off.
But that seems a lot like a Leon Russell send off, acting out my life in stages, with 10,000 people watching which is scary enough, so 20,000 shouldn’t be scarier?
The day after celebration, work begins no matter the weather.
Yes, this is predictable, leaning into a birthday-as-life-metaphor; I stand before you, self-accused, offering platitudes without revealing deep secrets, or even shallow ones that need to stay private between my conscience and my Muse (where is she, when will she show up to share these laughs, sad tears and horrific fears?).
Is the memory enough to keep this life and my dreams alive?
That “startin’ now, startin’ here” seems like a too-easy lame cliché.
But, if my tone is both reflective yet motivating, I might be relatable to anyone who ever had a 74th birthday, or who dreams of having one, I hope it’s useful to them as it is useful to me.
My life isn’t consistent strong pacing or a clean structure making it follow any desirable route or lust-filled drama.
No, it’s this last of a “three-day” framing of a birthday (before, during, after) fresh and foul, fair and freakish, nostalgia and horror film conflated into a question deserving the next episode of The West Wing when a writer creates an unforgettable line for Marin Sheen, to say with a sharpness the cleaves all that came before from the next line:
“What’s next?”
Reflection never equals resolve - they are simply holding two thoughts in our head at the same time, but please please please, don’t ask me to hold three.
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