Adding It Up

I REMEMBER CATCHING THIS LIVE on Letterman four years ago and being blown away. It popped up on one of my patented mix-CD's the other day, and man I was moved all over again, especially by the song's plaintive, brooding lyrics. You see, I just "celebrated" a birthday last week, and my naturally morbid state of mind has been consumed more than usual lately with thoughts of Mortality and Existence and maybe even plain old Terror about reaching the dreaded milestone known colloquially as the Big 5-0.

Twenty-seven years of nothin' but failures and promises that I couldn't keep
Oh lord I wasn't ready to go
I'm never ready to go
Let it ride

I mean, I'm about the last person to put any kind of stock into Society's artificial demarcations of time, but ya can't kid yourself anymore: the Great Hourglass of Life has been turned over and the sands of time are rushing down to the bottom with a loud whooshing sound. Or is it more like the Ultimate Halftime: You make your adjustments in the game plan against the Grim Reaper, then go at 'em in the second half. And hopefully it's Drop kick me Jesus through the goal posts of life...

Then again, I surprised myself by responding optimistically when a good friend who turns 50 later in the summer asked me if I felt old now having reached the half-century mark. No, I said, because that would be a waste of time and energy; if I live another, say, 20 years, then how silly it would be to feel old at a mere 50 years old, and if I die in a year or two, then it would have been even more absurd to be wasting my last year on Earth bemoaning something as uncontrollable as my age. I think I channeled some of my ancient Greek homeys for that answer, but for a while I had myself convinced, and at the end of the day or the month or the year or even decade, that's all that matters.

Let it ride easy down the road
Let it ride
Let it take away all of the darkness
Let it ride

In fact, this limited, finite lifespan suddenly confronting me could even work in my favor. I've always been a bit of a procrastinator, a coaster through life, a supreme goer-with of the flow -- a Type Z personality, if you will. Maybe this will force me to complete projects now, faced with leaving almost nothing behind when I do go.

But my latest tack is a novel one, albeit not a big surprise if you know me at all. Being a full-fledged, card-carrying Numerologist, I believe there is much more to numbers than just using them to count. And toward that end, I did the math, and my best decades invariably came when my age had an odd number in front of it! That is, to generalize greatly but not necessarily unfairly, my teens were one big Zoo, my twenties not so much; the thirties rocked, my forties were fucked. Now it's on to another "uneven" decade, and I'm personally attaching a large heaping of Significance to this. You're welcome to play along at home, but results will vary.

Let it rock me in the arms of strangers, angels until it brings me home
Let it ride
Let it roll
Let it go

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