Paul got me this object de art for my birthday.

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A pre note/quote:

Always keep Ithaca in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for many years;
and to anchor at the island when you are old,
rich with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.
(CAVAFY, ITHACA, 1911)


heading to 50:
On January 12th I did State Mandated pre birthday paperwork. I took the day off, oh so wonderful? First a visit to the doctor, who added a pill to control my blood pressure (well, its still pumping, inhaling and exhaling). Then off to the see the State of Illinois apparatchik to renew my state IDs at the DMV... I don't drive, but that’s the line to wait in. An alert apparatchik told me I could renew my driver's license (there was a year grace period that is not mentioned on their web page). It was the last day I could do that, so I did. Now I have TWO VALID id's - sadly in the same name so no DID here.

ONWARD

Birthday resolutions: figure out secondlife (internet thing); meaningful blog entries; read (reading Paul Auster's NEW YORK TRILOGY; finished the Christopher Moore I won -YOU SUCK about vampires, Pynchon is resting for a bit, I will return to him soon; DEAD SOULS might delay that aspiration).

www.librarything.com/catalog/jbeckhamlat

http://jbeckhamlat.blogspot.com/

and deal with RSS feeds . . ..

ALMOST THERE:
Saturday night I went to bed more mindlessly hopeful than realistically confident that I'd awaken as a roach. Opposed to waking up 50. FIFTY.

To wake up as anything other then what I fell asleep as. No such luck, although I have déjà vu type dreams of dancing cans of Raid in a sunny gnat free cemetery. The Raid cans were doing a legless CanCan dance while ghost like roach played harmonicas. There was a short mosquito like guy name Henri something Trekie sketching posters. As all my dreams it was a black and white with a harmonica based score. Absinthe flowed.


ARRIVAL:
50. A simple fulcrum day. Watched a few movies, my favorite: VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED (1960) based on John Wyndham's great read of a novel THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS, a DVRed episode of BOSTON LEGAL, then VAN HELSING -2004 (the Bram Stroker rationalist character widly updated). Made a beef rib roast and twice baked potatoes. Asparagus. Black berries and cottage cheese - two items from my childhood . . . Paul took those as some sign of delayed crisis.

And I re-read a little Maugham --I had just read a bit of Maugham days before. (I had lent a Maugham reader to a neighbor, who returned it - ironically the print was too small.) A bit of consolation if not comfort:

EXTRACTS FROM ''A WRITER'S NOTEBOOK''
By Somerset Maugham
1944

BY way of postscript. Yesterday I was seventy years old. As one enters
upon each succeeding decade it is natural, though perhaps irrational, to look
upon it as a significant event. When I was thirty my brother said to me: "Now
you are a boy no longer, you are a man and you must be a man," When I was forty
I said to myself: "That is the end of youth." On my fiftieth birthday I said:
"It's no good fooling myself, this is middle age and I may just as well
accept it." At sixty I said: "Now its time to put my affairs
in order, for this is the threshold of old age and I must settle my accounts." I
decided to with-draw from the theatre and I wrote The Summing Up, in which I
tried to review for my own comfort what I had learnt of life and literature,
what I had done and what satisfaction it had brought me. But of all
anniversaries I think the seventieth is the most momentous. One has
reached the three score years and ten which one is accustomed to accept as the
allotted span of man, and one can but look upon such years as remain to one as
uncertain contingencies stolen while old Time with his scythe has his head
turned the other way, At seventy one is no longer on the threshold of old age.
One is just an old man.

Not really sad, but on the mark for 1944. Most people now see 60 as the new 40 (back in early december 2006 that was a news story); and 40 the new 30.

Of course Somerset pointed out at 50 most of life had been spent . . . who lives to be 100?

But then there are places where you can live forever . . . . Inferno type places . . .

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
Ah me! how hard a thing
it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the
very thought renews the fear.

And you can find them in any library or google:

A NOTE ON LIBRARIES:
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6396388.html

(if Umberto Eco were dead he'd be spinning in his grave; ever since the closing of smoking rooms the sophistication of learning has suffered; next the thought police -hide those library records; then ultimately THE DREAM POLICE, conceal those aspirations)...

onward to 60!

Finally final:

A note from actor George Sanders 26 apr 1972, Barcelona, the seaside hotel Rey Don Jaime at Castelldefels.

From the NYT:

A police spokesman said five empty tubes of Nembutal were found in Mr. Sander's
room.

One note read: "Dear World: I am leaving because I am
bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your
worries in this sweet cesspool -good luck." The other, written in
Spanish, asked that Mr. Sander's sister in London be notified of his death.

===

TOMORROW AND TOMORROW AND TOMORROW . . . now where is my copy of Thanatopsis by Bryant?


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THIS WAS AN ICE MAN STANDING ON MICHIGAN AVENUE TALL AND PROUD MONDAY - when I did not have my camera. By Tuesday he had tumbled, even tho the temperaturs had not.