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This year’s birthday proved to be a difficult one; not, I should make clear, because of the birthday itself — after 47 years, I’ve found that getting older is a fairly automated process if you manage to stay alive — but because of everything else that was happening on the day. By any regular standard, my birthday this year was filled with Things To Do that ranged from the low key (pitching stories for work, writing up one of those stories when it got accepted) to the major (a vet appointment that confirmed that one of the dogs has a sizable malignant tumor on his spleen), with more ranging to the latter end of that spectrum. It was, for any day, a lot.

It was suggested to me during the day that it’s become a tradition that I have unfortunate birthdays. This is perhaps a good thing to have forgotten, but apparently last year also saw the day hijacked by bad news — I think it was to do with paperwork relating to the divorce settlement, but I can’t really remember? — leading to the possibility that October 5th has become regularly full of bad luck and unpleasant events at some point of my life; not the most pleasant idea to play with, I think everyone would agree.

I spent part of the day thinking about how shitty a birthday it was — in no small part because others kept pointing it out, albeit in well meaning tones — and came to the realization that, if nothing else, it fit: 2021 has been, in no uncertain terms, what Queen Elizabeth II famously called an annus horriblis — a horrible, difficult year — for me, with career prospects disappearing, new opportunities arising only to vanish, and bad news plaguing loved ones on a depressingly regular basis. With that surrounding context, why should I expect a birthday that wasn’t filled with bad news, difficult conversations, and frustrations big and small?

Oddly enough, that realization helped, some. That said, if events could conspire to get better any time soon, I’d really appreciate that, please and thank you.

A true sign of how fast the last year has moved came the other day when I realized that the birthday post I made here for my 46th birthday was, in fact, almost a year old. What does that say about how I interact with the world, I wonder, that I find my birthdays marked by blog posts and finding new ways to talk about getting older? Nothing good, I suspect.

This birthday, the one happening tomorrow, is my 47th. For some reason, I’m getting hung up on that number over the last week, as if it’s the number that puts me closer to 50 than “in my mid-40s,” in some magical fashion that is inescapable and somehow, inexplicably, meaningful: Once you hit 47, there’s no turning back…

The obvious flaw in this argument is, of course, the inherent scariness of being 50. In my head, I know that it’s really a relatively arbitrary number — what is that different about 50 than 40, or 30? Each of those felt like milestones at the time, as if they were ends of one era and the beginning of another. The reality, of course, turned out to be far more complicated, with personal eras starting and stopping at inopportune times and hitting numbers that haven’t been attached with any larger societally agreed-upon meaning. (I was going to prove my point by saying that I got divorced at 44, and then had a moment of, “Is 44 some magic number because of the repetition?”)

Nonetheless, 50 looms in the near future for me, the latest in a line of ages that make me feel as if I should have everything figured out and lined up by that point. I know, too, that that idea is a flawed one; that there’s no such thing as having everything figured out, because life is messy and throws all kinds of distractions and problems in your way just when the road ahead looks smooth. Still, the idea floats ahead of me, a promise so far unmet but maybe possible by some method I haven’t quite worked out yet. Maybe that’s still to come; I have three years, after all.

Now that we’ve finally made it to October, I think it’s safe to finally tell the world: September was cursed.

I mean, that’s the only explanation for quite how strange (and, at times, difficult) the month ended up being, right? I know, I know; October should, by all rights — if not all rites, get it? — be the cursed month, considering it’s Spooky Central and the place where Hallowe’en resides and all, but the evidence doesn’t lie: I’ve never had any October that felt as trying and difficult as this past month has been. September 2021 was, by no stretch of the imagination, a cursed month.

If it wasn’t one dog’s dental surgery — 17 teeth removed at once! They even gave them to me in a tiny little test tube afterwards — then it was new of a tumor in another dog, or the possibility of yet another dog moving in, only for that to go wrong in such a fashion as to be concerning and no little amount of anxiety inducing. (The dog is a lovely dog, but he’s not a dog who could deal with the house as it currently exists, put it that way.)

That’s to say nothing about the wait to find out if the lease on the house would be renewed, or if we’d all be homeless in a couple of months. It was renewed, thankfully; going house hunting in these times would be a trial too far, I suspect. There was also the weekend of wondering if the nine year old had COVID, as well, although it thankfully was just a cold.

Oh, but then there’s the work elements, too; the publication of a piece I finished weeks earlier, prompting all kinds of discourse online that made me feel awkward and uncomfortable, as well as writing new pitches, one of which was for an entire job, many if not most of which came to nothing at all, because things are slowing up in a dramatic sense when it comes to my earning money. At one point, I was getting rejections left, right, and center and wanting to just respond, look at how popular this piece is, I could be doing that for you right now.

October may not be any easier on the work front, but at least everything else is unlikely to repeat in the next 31 days. After all, what are the odds of having two cursed months in a row…?

I ended last week in a few pieces, I have to admit, at least when it comes to emotions and thought processes. The week proved to be an especially difficult one, even though there wasn’t one particularly reason why that would be the case — there were, in my defense, about seventeen smaller ones, and Friday especially brought some news that was particularly difficult to deal with, if more than a little inconclusive. Nonetheless, it was one of those weeks that felt roughly three weeks longer than it should have been.

In sharing that observation with someone, the response came that, basically, that was the norm these days. When was the last time that a week hadn’t felt roughly a month long, they asked? When was the last time that it seemed as if everything had either worked out in everyone’s favor, or for that matter, just kept chugging along quietly without bothering anyone one way or another? It was a fair point, and the kind of reaction that simultaneously made me feel bad for complaining about my mental and emotional load and also wondering, wait, is everything just fucked now and that’s what we should consider the baseline for life? Doesn’t that mean that something is very wrong?

The thing is, even with the deluge of minor league bad news coming towards me, even with the unusually difficult year that 2021 has been for me professionally, I still can’t quite sign onto the idea that something is very wrong. There’s no small amount of irony in the fact that, personally, I’m actually in a far better place even with all of the shit happening right now than I was, say, five years ago — a fact that has me wondering just where my head and heart would’ve been if all of the bad news had struck when I was still where I was back then.

Things aren’t good, overall; there’s no denying that, and no real point in even trying. But, despite everything, I’m happier and in better shape for dealing with all this shit. That’s got to be something, at least.

I found myself listening to the new reissue of Super Furry Animals’ Rings Around the World album the other day, enjoying the unreleased tracks and the remixes. It was somewhere around the fourth or fifth track that I listened to, skipping around out of order, before it hit me: the fact that it was a 20th Anniversary Edition meant that Rings Around the World had come out two full decades earlier. Even now, that just doesn’t really feel possible.

It’s not that I feel as if music can’t have progressed since the release of what remains a perfectly wonderful, enjoyable album. (I’m amused, listening to it now, that so many of my favorite tracks today are the ones that I disliked on its initial release, and wonder what that says about me, and about aging in general; I’ve been singing “Alternate Route to Vulcan Street” for the last week.) More than that, it’s the sense that I can remember my experience of listening to the album the first time around in such detail that it feels almost impossible that this all happened 20 years earlier. Since when was my memory this good?

And yet: those memories place me in Scotland. Those memories have me still having hair, and being surrounded by piles of CDs — remember CDs? — as I sat at my iMac listening to the album. All of these things that, ironically, feel far older than happening two decades ago. The detail of the iMac alone feels roughly several lifetimes earlier; remember how modern they seemed at the time, and how, today, they feel as dated and signifiers of moments in design history as those weird bubble seats from the 1960s? (My iMac was “aquamarine,” which felt very exotic at the time. Oh, how innocent I was back then…! How little I knew…!)

Music has always felt more essential, more contemporary and now, than almost all other media, in my experience; it’s always had an easier connection to my memory and my responses, something more immediate and unavoidable. Now, thinking about it, I wonder how much of those connections are based on things that aren’t actually true, deep down.

(Rings Around the World is still a great album, and something you should all revisit, mind you.)

The strangest thing about my career, or what remains of it, is the fact that no-one ever seems to be entirely sure about the limits of what I can and can’t do in any particular situation.

For editors or those in charge of commissioning stories, there’s a feeling that I have complete control over sources or the events surrounding any particular story — or, at least, that I can pivot in almost any circumstance to get the desired outcome. The number of times I’ve been asked (or perhaps more appropriately, instructed) to get specific answers or statements that no-one wants to offer up is significant, as is the number of times I’ve had to patiently try anyway, before apologizing for my failure.

Worse, perhaps, are the times when the subject of a story believes that I have final say over the story. Just recently, I’ve had some of the more surreal experiences of my work life when people involved in stories have made demands after the fact of pieces they’ve been interviewed for or contributed to, in some way — up to and including asking for something that was printed to be altered, as if anyone had the ability to change what already existed in physical form days after it had been shipped to retailers. (It genuinely seemed a surprise that I didn’t have that power, when I explained that to them.)

At times, I make jokes about how such things are above my pay grade, to make light of the fact that, in so many of these situations, I’m actually pretty powerless. The reality of the situation is, especially as a freelancer, I’m a middle man, a service provider. I make connections and put things together in multiple ways, and a story comes out of that.

In reality, I have limited power in my situation, despite being central to the finished story. It’s an odd position to be in, which might explain why no-one seems to get how it works.

Chloe and I have been pursuing what I, initially (and mistakenly) thought was an impossible dream, this year: Watching at least 200 movies together across the year, despite never going to the movie theater once. (That wasn’t part of the mission statement, admittedly, it’s just how it’s worked out so far. Yes, I know that movie theaters are open now, but so is my paranoia about getting sick and so, streaming and DVD rentals it is.)

When we set the goal at the start of the year, 200 felt like an unobtainable target: that’s more or less four movies a week! Now, as we near the end of September and the final three months of the year, it feels not only entirely doable, but almost pedestrian in terms of its ambition. Only 200? Why, we could have gone at least as high as 250, I think to myself. (I have, I admit, started to unofficially hope that we get to 240, at least. I don’t know why 240 in particular; the mind goes where it goes.)

We’re currently somewhere around 160. We reached that point this past weekend, ending a week where we somehow managed to get in ten movies, which isn’t even counting the two we started and abandoned because they were genuinely unwatchable. Given that we managed to complete the horrific Cruella, that might give you an idea of just how bad the two we abandoned were — considering both were relatively critically acclaimed, there’s no little humor to be found there for both Chloe and I. (Apparently, the bar is lower for musicals, I guess…?)

In the midst of all of this movie watching, it strikes me that we’ve managed to create a new tradition by accident, where we settle into movie nights (or movie afternoons, if we’re both not working, or even movie mornings, depending how lazy we’re feeling) and it’s this thing that just happens. Whether or not the movie is good, or whether or not it’s the result of one of us — usually me — wanting to work through an entire series of films, or whatever. I doubt we’ll be able to make it through another 200 movies next year, but at this point of the year, I very much hope we’d try.

As the weather (finally) gets colder, I can feel the world shift from summer towards that time of the year known universally as “scratchy throat season.” You know the drill: it’s when the days get shorter, the temperature drops, and you start feeling that little tickle at the back of your throat that makes you feel as if you have to cough to clear it up.

This isn’t a new thing, of course. It happens every single year, and it’s always something that gets chalked up to the change in the weather. This is something that I’ve come to expect since childhood, with my parents explaining away any potential ailment as being due to the shift in the temperature and my body needing to come to terms with the new normal. (Well, almost any ailment; I’m pretty sure if I’d broken a bone or something that wouldn’t have been their reaction, although I couldn’t swear to it.)

The problem is, of course, this year, a scratchy throat is the one thing you really don’t want to have. If there’s one thing you really, really don’t want to be doing while out in public, it’s coughing or clearing your throat, after all. I know that firsthand after spending the last week or so having to discreetly do that, and then feeling as if I was going to have everyone turning around and facing me in shock, pointing and screaming “Diseased!” at the top of their lungs.

I get it. The paranoia is real; even when I’m out myself with a mask, I’m particularly aware when other people are coughing, or clearing their throats, or simply making any kind of noise that could suggest that they’re not 100 percent healthy. I am those paranoid types convinced that sickness is around the corner, so it stands to reason that I’m particularly conscious of when I seem like the sick one.

Perhaps I just need to make things easier; get a t-shirt made that reads, “It’s the change in the seasons, that’s all,” and point to it whenever necessary.

I mean, at least I’m still wearing a mask.

There’s no denying that the choice to let the kid go back to school in school this year was a tough one. It also wasn’t a particularly difficult choice to make, at the same time.

To say that CDL — Comprehensive Distance Learning, aka “doing school through a laptop” as we’d been doing since March last year — was an effort was an understatement; it was understandably difficult to get him motivated about doing it, and if anything, more difficult to get him to concentrate on actually doing the work when necessary for all of that time, as well. (How could it not be? The rest of the internet was right there, after all.) Add to that, the feeling that we, as parents, felt having to keep him on task while simultaneously keep him quiet enough that we could do all the shit that we had to do, and… yeah; it was an effort, indeed.

So, the prospect of his returning to school in person was initially an exciting one for all of us. For him, especially; he’s a social kid, and lockdown left him adrift without his friends, with the exception of a few scant play dates. The idea that he could go back to school full time with all of his friends was something that almost made him cry with excitement and anticipation, with absolutely no exaggeration. On that side, it was an easy choice.

Even easier: it’s what the school system demanded. There was a CDL option available, but it was clear from all communication that it was seen as a poor Plan B. In-person learning was where it was at, as far as the local schools demanded.

But the Delta variant and the new wave of infections loom in the background, making everything seem dangerous again. These were kids, too; how successful could any attempt to enforce social distancing, or even appropriate mask etiquette, be with a building of hundreds of kids? It felt like lunacy to consider, even as the kid told us over and over again how excited he was. We said yes, nervously, hoping for the best, knowing that his heart would break if we’d done anything else.

His reaction after the first day made us all feel it was worth it; how could anyone be so excited for school? He was thrilled, glowing from the experience.  It was a relief that we hadn’t made the wrong decision, even as each morning brings new worry that someone, somewhere, would cough in such a way that the fear takes over again.

It’s a cliche, I know, to complain about getting older and what it means to you physically; it’s one of those things that has become so rote, so unoriginal, as to almost become meaningless — as if a complaint about your mother-in-law had inherent insight or merit, or any kind of commentary about millennials and, well, anything, really. Nonetheless, dear reader, as I sit here and write this, I have to tell you, I am a broken man and it’s something I have decided to ascribe entirely to aging. Maybe some cliches have an element of truth to them, after all.

I am, simply, aching. I did some yard work — not even a lot, just an hour or so — and the price I’m paying for it feels entirely ridiculous and over the top: a day later, I just ache from head to foot, with particular pain attention being paid to my legs and, for some entirely unknown reason, the fingers in my right hand. Specifically, it’s my bones that are aching, as if to be even more cliched; I am literally bone tired. If nothing else, I should take it as a sign that I likely need to do far more exercise than I do… or, perhaps, less yard work.

As I ache, I find myself thinking things like, this didn’t used to hurt so much, did it? or is my body trying to tell me to take it easier? as if there’s one simple reason for the dull maladies I’m feeling all over. The feeling of, well, just being still but still feeling that throb of messaging from all over that you’ve over exerted yourself is something I’m putting down almost entirely to getting older, more than actually doing too much or treating my body too unkindly. It’s easier that way, almost; it’s expected, almost — the cliche is cliche for a reason — and unavoidable. If I ache because of aging, it’s not my fault. That’s easier than admitting that maybe I should take better care of myself.