I don’t need another reason to want to work from home more and work in the office less, but I have one. A good one.
There is something about the lighting and the mirror in the men’s room in the office that really points out how much grey there is in my hair. Especially around my temples and right above my ears. The grey hair really just leaps out at you.
Yeah, that’s a damn good reason to want to work from home more and work in the office less. As if I needed another reason, right?
What to do, what to do. The downside of getting old is the increasing disinterest in all things social. The upside is…
is…
Is there an upside to getting old?
I’m down to the final minutes of my lunch break on this fine Friday afternoon. I am pretty exhausted from a lack of sleep over the past… month(s) but I’m hanging in there. I had some Purdue Popcorn chicken and some peanuts and some sugar free Hershey bites for lunch. I really want a drink of water but I still have to wait the better part of an hour before I am clear to drink anything. That’s a gastric bypass patient thing. If you know, you know.
Fed Ex delivered a package today. I am not home to get it, but it contains a new guitar pedal. If I read the amazon shipping notes correctly, it’s a compressor pedal. The first I’ve ever purchased. I have this weird idea of using cleaner guitar sounds for this year’s RPM Challenge in February and a compressor will be a part of that. I bought an MXR Dyna Comp because it’s super simple and it will let me squash my clean signal down to a delightfully mushy… mush. There are two more pedals coming over the weekend. One is a Flanger, the other is an Amp Sim. I don’t have room on my pedal board for any of these kiddos and I don’t have open slots on my power brick… so I am going to need to get creative, I think. It should be fun. I don’t think I bought a single guitar pedal during all of 2024. I know I bought a couple of microphones for band practices that haven’t actually happened yet, but no pedals.
There are a lot of tentative plans for the weekend. We may be messing with our living room and we may be going to some stores for research purposes. I hope to spend some time wandering around town taking pictures with my new/possibly antique (though probably not) camera. I got a gift card for the sugar free bakery in Salem, NH for xmas. I haven’t bought anything from them in about a month, but now I am definitely going back and getting some cookies. Good stuff.
What else… I thought there was something else… One of our cars is going to get a break job. That wasn’t the thing that I am forgetting though… am I going to go shopping for a new iPhone? That’s definitely on the to-do list before we go to Florida at the end of the month, but is it this weekend? I don’t know.
I have to start practicing the guitar. The band is hoping to reconvene (hopefully for real this time) at some point after this weekend. I need to get ready for that. Which guitar should I bring to the first practice? Probably the Les Paul Standard that my wife got me for my 50th birthday in 2021. I really dig that guitar.
I know I had something else I wanted to write about but it has slipped my brain entirely. Don’t get old, kids. This is what happens to you when you get old. Stay young for as long as you can. Unless you’re already old like me in which case… sorry, folks. We had a good run, I’m sure.
It’s April 30th. The last day of the month. Normally that’s not a big deal, but this month… this month…
April 2021 is the last full month of my forties. There is a day in the month of May… a day that is coming soon… a day that the first digit in my age changes, and that is a bad thing. When it changed from zero to one it was awesome. When it changed from one to two it was also awesome. When it changed from two to three… well that sucked. That sucked bad. When it changed from three to four it was painful but by then the damage was done, and I also had Jen to make me feel better about it.
Four changing to five feels about the same as three to four, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t suck. I’ve got eight days left. Eight days left in my forties, which I didn’t even want in the first place but now that they are ending…
crap.
…….and I just found out my friend’s kid has Covid. The universe is a prick.
Today is the day.
Today is the day when the first of my friends from my high school class (Tewksbury High, class of 1989) celebrates his 50th birthday.
Mike the bass player is 50 years old.
Damn, brother. We are OLD!
Happy 50th birthday, Mike.
I’ve told this story before, I’m sure.
Back in the late 1970’s (or possibly the very early 1980’s) when I was just a little fat guy of less than 10 years of age, George Lucas announced to the world that there would be nine Star Wars movies and that he would release one every three years. My father, the undisputed master of all things math, instantly calculated that the final movie would hit the theaters in 2001. “You’ll be 30 years old,” he told the smaller yet still fat assed version of me, “so you’ll have to take me to see it.”
As someone who was probably between the ages of six and nine years old, the concept of a 30 year old me was a little too big to comprehend, let alone the idea of me taking my father anywhere. It did sort of set a date into my head though. 2001 was something real, not just a movie title. There were a bunch of years that would lead up to it, but once the calendar reached 2001 it would feel like I had arrived at my destination. Anything after 2001 could not possibly exist. It was just fantasy.
Until it happened, that is.
Now we stand here, just a few hours shy of the start of 2014. To that I say, No fricken way! Most people are thinking to themselves, where did 2013 go hahaha? Not me. I’m still thinking, where did 2010 go. And 2007. And 2002. What the hell?
My step son and I were talking the other day about how all kids wish they were adults, and all adults wish they were kids. That might be a slight exaggeration, but it’s not too far off. There is one reason for that adult wish that I never really considered when I was still a kid. The years go by so much faster when you’re older. If I had known that was going to happen I would have fought the changes much harder than I did! It’s like we reached 2001, then I blinked, and then it was 12/31/13! What the bloody hell happened???
Granted, I’ve done some cool stuff over those years. The stretch of time beginning in early April of 2007 through today stands out as particularly wonderful. Still… how can it be 2014? Wasn’t it just New Years Eve a few months ago? Can’t we slow down and smell the roses? Can’t we stop the world because I want to get off? Can’t we do any number of other cliches relating to the speed at which time passes?
Inside the Red Head's Head 