Big Birthday

I just reached the speed limit of birthdays.  It has been feeling too fast for awhile, and now it is official.  My life has been full of half-hearted attempts at achievement, followed by long periods of potential.  I seem to remember a physics lesson about potential and kinetic energy that might apply.  I believe that everything important to know I learned before I was fourteen, including stuff that involved pulleys and springs. 

This might be the first birthday ever when I didn't even get a cake.  Somehow the tradition of chocolate cake has been replaced by expensive restaurant meals.  I must visit a bakery tomorrow and correct the omission.

It is cliche to comment on the aging process.  For one thing you immediately lose your audience.  Those older than you make fun of your anguish.  Those younger still can't imagine what you are talking about.  Also, we all worry about such different things.  I repeatedly come back to a board game I played as a kid, called "Careers" where you had to pick a mix of fame, fortune and happiness, and find the career that was most likely to give you that mix.  I remember I always did an even division, unable to guess which aspect of life might be the most important.  I note that there was no option to choose lawyer in that game, perhaps indicating a basic flaw in my path.

Anyway, as I face the second half of life (!), I promise myself there will be more creativity, more friends, and  more adventures.  There will be more action, less potential energy stored in springs.  There will be more beauty, less cynicism.  Already, it has begun.

Lost in the Funhouse

I have been lost in Blipland for more than a month.  This magical place is found at blipfoto.com, where I masquerade as Lido Beach.  http://www.blipfoto.com/grazingllama   Although writing words is part of the experience, mostly it is a daily scavenger hunt for a photo worthy of framing for all to see.  Because of this activity, my image-ining being must apologize to my literary being.  But here I am, at my wordy desk. 

Geography and its delights depends on expectations about the weather.  The Northwest has not been behaving as it should and thus, a trip to the emptiness of southeast Oregon did not yield the hot dry weather I craved.  It was cool, rainy and the high places were filled with snow.  But where most of the landscape is open for the taking, and you can camp and hike wherever you want, I relaxed into the car camping routine, which goes like this:  Take everything out of the car, make some imitation of a home without all those hard edged walls, cook, clean, sit around, go to sleep, and then put it all back into the car and go some other place and take it all out again.  

During our journeys we saw evidence of those who tried to keep the outside out and then what happens when they gave up.  How quickly nature took back the property, the rats and owls and swallows moving into places where people once had raised a family.  It was fun and sad to take pictures of the disintegration.

Looking at the remnants of lives lived makes me yearn to create something of value to mark my place on earth.  I know the Ozymandias foolishness of  this desire, but it fuels my creative endeavors.   In the end, I just want to be able to see a path behind me of where I have been, to remember all the days, even as they slip away.