Thirty, 30

I am 30 years old today.

Thirty.
Years.
Old.

I usually don't give a frag about my birthday, and most years I don't even give this day a second thought.  Certain numbers though, do seem to stand out.  At 16 I could drive, at 18 I could vote, and 21 meant I could stop getting other people to buy my alcohol.  But since then, none of the numbers have really meant anything to me, I mean seriously, who could get all worked up about celebrating their 27th birthday?  Get over yourself already.

But 30?  I mean damn.  THIRTY?  Am I really thirty gahdamned years old?  I actually had a very sobering moment a few weeks ago while watching one of my favorite movies, "Mallrats".  I was sitting there enjoying all of that fantastic, quotable dialog ("That kid is BACK on the escalator!") when it suddenly struck me just how long ago the movie was made.  "Mallrats" was released in 1995, just as I was starting my senior year of high-school.  I was 17 years old.  SEVENTEEN!  The movie is now more than 12 years old, and it really seems like just yesterday that I was watching it for the first time.   The 90's, the decade that I spent in high-school and college, is LONG GONE.  Music that I love from that time is now showing up on classic rock stations, mixed in with garbage from Van Halen, Journey and Styx.  Jesus-h-rimjobbing-christmas-tree!  The Foo Fighters might not be the best band on the planet, but do they really deserve to have their songs sandwiched in between 80's hair-band ass-hattery and 70's pussified soft-rock circle-jerk-a-ration?

Probably the worst part about turning 30 is all the "helpful" folks who keep reminding you that it isn't a big deal.  I mean, no shit, I'm not fucking retarded.  I'm fully aware that I am really only a day older than I was yesterday, that age is just a number, that getting older beats the alternative, and at least I'm not turning 50 (har-de-har-har), every birthday cliché in the book.  My own mother noted in my birthday card that I am more than halfway to being a senior citizen.  Had I just been left alone, I probably would have been able to just let this day slip by like any other, but people just won't let it go.  At least after this I probably won't get bothered about a birthday again until I'm 40, so I've got THAT to look forward to.

One thing that softens the blow of this "milestone" is the knowledge that I am in better physical shape than I was when I turned 26.  I'm only about 5'9", and I weighed about 205 just before my 26th birthday.  I did a pretty good job getting in shape after that and got down to about 170 at my lowest.  I slowly got back up to about 195 just before my 29th, but I knocked it back down again and kept my weight around 175 for all of last year.  I found about 5 more pounds over the holidays, but I'm still doing OK.  I've got to get back on the wagon and do the final push to get rid of a little extra baggage, but at least I don't feel disgusting anymore.  I was talking to Sunburned Goose about this at work a few days ago.  (He is just about the same age as me.)  Is this what our lives have come down to now?  Having to closely monitor what we eat and how much we exercise to make sure that we don't swell up like a possum corpse rotting on the side of a sweltering Alabama highway?  Dammit, I want to be able to eat an entire pizza for dinner, finish off a sixer of beer for dessert, and wake up the next day feeling fantastic.  Those days are gone.  GONE!  So when I get home this afternoon, I'll be heading down to my basement to spend some time on my home gym, because it's time to stop screwing around and start getting serious about treating my body as nicely as I can.  Thirty might seem old now, but hopefully I have many more decades ahead of me and I'd like to spend them living in a temple, not a tent, if you know what I'm saying.

I don't know where I was going with this blog post, but maybe that is the point.  I'm getting old and I ramble a lot more than I used to.  This is particularly worrisome if you know how much I had a tendency to ramble on even when I was a young goober of just 16.  By the time I turn 50 I'll probably just be blabbing all gahdamned day about the weather, kids these days, what's wrong with politics, and how much better the world was when I was in college.

To wrap this up, I thought I would share the names of some famous folks that have the good fortune of being born on the same day as me.  I already knew about Muhammad Ali, Jim Carrey and Andy Kaufman, but I found a couple new ones on the interwebs today.  I can also claim Benjamin Franklin and Al Capone as my birthday brothers.  Coolness, our nation's wildest founding father and a criminal psychopath with syphillis.