Oldness, and Where Did The Last 18 Years Go?

It's my birthday soon. I will be 36. 36. Thirty. Six. No longer can I fiddle the way I say how old I am to say 'mid-thirties', no, from here on in, it is most assuredly 'late thirties', or 'late mid-thirties'. In short, I am getting old. So old, in fact, that half my life ago I was old enough to a) drive, b) get a mortgage and c) join the army and get killed in some pointless war we should never have been involved with anyway fight for my country (ahem). Not old enough to bugger or be buggered, however - not that I'd want to, I am as hetero as they come, but it always amuses me that, before they changed the age of gay consent, you could be entrusted with a financial burden like a mortgage, have a child, be trained to use a gun and go murder people in a foreign land, but not old enough to have consenting sex with another man. 

So, half my life ago I was 18. My Grandad had just passed away, which saddened me as he had been a huge figure in my life, I was doing abysmally in my first set of 'A' Levels due to having discovered my guitar and a social life, and was single. This latter wasn't out of choice, I hasten to add, I was just repellent to women in those days, I think. During that year I started college, taking a Performing Arts course, which taught me several things; that performing artists are largely neurotic, bitchy shits, and that I really should have done the media course instead, where I met several people who would become long-lasting friends, including the inimitable Zorg.   I was addicted to Frontier: Elite 2 on my Amiga this year, and had an all night bender where I played it non-stop for about two days running, stopping only to eat, make coffee, wee, and poo. I had to sleep eventually as I was convinced that somehow I was building a bridge with only one brick, my brain's way of saying "FOR FUCK'S SAKE, LET ME GO! LET ME GO!"

And now I'm almost 36. In the intervening years, I have been married, divorced, had two children, had several jobs, been to college (again, though this time got far better results), been to university, made music, written lots of bloggage, and met my perfect woman. Yet all of this sometimes seems to have happened in the blink of an eye. It was my daughters' 10th birthday the other week, and that made me realise how quickly a whole decade had flashed past. I blame work. When you work, you get up, all sleepy, you have coffee, you blunder out to work, spend most of your time and energy working, come home tired, have tea, sleep, and repeat, and on your days off generally fill them up with all the odd jobs that you can't do when you're working, like going shopping, or taking the car to the garage to get new tyres, or one of a billion other things you'd really rather not have to do. The last 10 months have been wonderfully clear, and thoroughly enjoyable despite being unemployed and therefore having no cash; the whole day belongs to me, and I can write, finally; I can also piss time away on Second Life or playing Battlefield 2 if I want to. But this time has passed at what I consider to be a reasonable pace, and it has made me appreciate time in a whole new way that I hitherto suspected. Namely, that work is a vampire that, in a very real sense, sucks your life away from you, and before you know it you're old, tired, and about to die. 

Now I just have to get some writing published so that I can justify doing sod all all week and make that a job...