10 days till 40

On my 30th birthday I woke up in a small bachelor apartment in that building on Wilton and Melrose.

I had one of my typical heroin habits, like 2 months into maybe a 20 dollar a day habit, and always sick.

I really was a flunky junkie. I never felt like Nico.

I had lost everything.

I had lost the record deal about a year earlier. I spent that year in my underwear playing Sony playstation and trying to see as many naked women as a 28k modem would allow through the 1998 aol web browser. I was living with a cute 23 year old girlfriend, and apparently a lot of other people, some of whom I meet today with no recollection of.

One day I looked at her and asked her if I looked fat, and she stared at me vapidly.

I said "It's over isn't it" she concurred.

The band had broken up. The vessel of my constant self reinvention trying to find my footing in this town to get "mine". After numerous hair dues, looks, a sadly a fairly small body of work, and the natural contention that comes when 3 people are stuck together with something offering nothing, we called it quits.

I had traded in the never realized muscle car for what was a postal truck, sans irony, but out of practicality and financial need.

Most of my friends at that point had gone crazy, or disappeared. I had started detaching years ago, when it became apparent the band wasn't gonna make it.

It was all riding on that. Funny enough you'd never know it by how little energy I put into it.

30 seemed to have more weight to it 10 years ago. Maybe because my generation would some how make it ok to wear tight pants, Vans and to skateboard well into them.

I was still carrying the boomer implications of 30. A logans Run where you no longer have any relevance and essentially go straight and get out of touch or just end up relegated to the bad taste of the era you got stuck in. In some regards we paved the way for the kids born in 79 and after.

I was PAing a car commercial that day. I remember waking up with a hole in my gut, slightly dope sick, with a feeling of impending doom knowing the day I had ahead of me.

The emptiness and disappointment.

I had nothing. The apartment was tiny, and housed nothing but a bed, a mac 7600 and the TV I had bought at the Good Guys at 2 am one night years prior with my record deal money. It was all I had left from the deal.

I can't believe that was 10 years ago. It was in fact the beginning of the life I have today and I had no idea.

I had spent that day scraping paint off a hanger floor, and trying to figure out how to get out of there to cash the 25 dollar check my grandmother had sent me for my birthday for drugs.

I thought it was over.

and it was.

Everything I had known was over.

I only remember portions of that day, but I remember laying in bed that night crying harder than I may have cried since I had been a kid.

And now i sit on the precipice watching a world I had spent the past 10 years working so hard to get on top of now fade. Not because of luck, or talent or because of my own laziness or addictions, but because the whole deal is changing. You can't stop things from losing their value, no matter what they are, and the things I have become good at helping to make are losing theirs.

But it's ok, the one thing age gives you is perspective.

I'm not as scared of 40 as I was of 30.

I'm too busy being scared of 50.