Snotty.
I was very tempted to leave today's entry at that. I don't know if one word would count (what are the rules to this? And does anyone care? I can do whatever I want can't I? You'd think so, but I am not so sure), but it pretty much sums up the day. I knew I was unlikely to be firing on all cylinders on my day off, but it was a shame that I was actually ill. Not untypical though. I am 45 and two thirds today and though I refuse to act my age, my age is going to have some impact on how I act. Maybe I need to slow things down a little bit. Why can't we just stay young forever?
I was reminded of the passage of time by journalist Bruce Dessau posting a link to
a 1995 Lee and Herring interview in Vox. Funny to see us discussing 50 year olds as if anyone that old was from a different world. Especially as I am only 4 years and 4 months from being 50 myself. Curse you God.
But my illness was making me freak out about even older and more forgotten moments from the past. I went to bed early, but woke in a panic, fretting about a girl at school whose name I couldn't even remember who I had fancied and who I thought had maybe fancied me, but that I'd never asked out. It was probably too late to do anything about this now and I don't know why my brain had dredged up this three decade old flirtation and was now making me feel confused and miserable about it. And if it was going to behave in this stupid way then might I suggest in future it makes me feel confused and miserable at the time rather than waiting 28 years to make me feel the stabbing pang of regret. Once I had woken up properly I got things in perspective and realised that this was not a very important incident from my life and certainly didn't bear this late flush of despondency. I had had a girlfriend at the time and although we had a largely platonic relationship this suited me then. Maybe I was looking back and wishing I had not been so childish and scared of sexual matters. But I was and there's nothing I can do about that now, except make sure that my own children do not fall into the same trap and are getting off with their schoolmates as soon as possible.
We only regret the things we didn't do. And also the things we did.
But only those two things. It's not bad to live a life with only two regrets.
It's like my body is giving me a little taster of being properly old: ill, semi-lame and being bamboozled by the passage of time and haunted by the mistakes or disappointments of youth, unable to tell which things happened yesterday and which things happened eighty years before.
Of course there's every chance that I am already eighty and the things that I think I am experiencing are just disjointed memories of things I did half a lifetime ago. In which case can I ask my addled brain to stop remembering the day when I was ill and hallucinating and try and live in one of the sexier moments. Or at least in one of the moments when I was hallucinating something sexy. Anything but the 12th March 2013.
