Being Thirty, A Preface

This many years later, I think "being thirty" is a postscript, and one I can barely remember.


I ran across the above titled journal entry, which was intended initially as a letter to a friend of the same approximate age, that I never actually sent. 


If there was personal history behind me then, there is much more now. It took many more years after this for me to have the vaguest idea who I was, and I am hoping I have a few more in which to create some kind of meaningful coalescence. Anyway, here were my thoughts just before turning 30, before gray hair, when I was fairly thin and thought I was fat, when I was not unattractive, but had no idea, when I was just starting out in California for all practical purposes afraid to take the road to the creative and played it safe with the "law", at least two years before my 25 year "career" at the State Bar which ended in minutes as if it had never been.  If I live as long going forward as I have since I wrote this, I will probably been in a home telling people that my skin still looks young as I have no wrinkles. . .


A snapshot of the 29 year old Djinn on the cusp of 30 with the context of me from my law school yearbook, a few years before that, prior to my move to California, at age 25.  But I looked pretty much the same at 29 and I kinda like my law school yearbook picture. 

Being Thirty, A Preface:

An entirely subjective evaluation.
A fragmented evaluation.
Incomplete, like life.
I realize I have a history.
A personal history. A history of relationships, some ended, some still evolving.
And a history in conjunction with the rest of nameless mankind.

I realize, rather, I acknowledge, that I am progressing, and at the same time, moving toward the not so pleasant prospect of death.  But, though I joke about it, I really don't believe yet it will happen to me, or to my friends. I simply cannot avoid thinking about it more frequently than I would like, or more frequently than was necessary when I was a child--now since so many of my parents' generation are dead.

With their deaths, a chapter closes, making the chapter of being thirty more of a demarcation, than, say twenty.

When I was twenty my whole family was still alive. My mother was sick, but there was still a child-like hope of miracles. There was college, a myopic, but pleasant fantasy.

There were conclusive expressions about the future. Some of us knew exactly what we'd be doing at thirty.

Marriage and children. A possibility. Not much thought of.  And certainly, it would be done very differently from the parents.

I find myself longing now for a child.

I see from the many pregnancies in the die hard 'not me'ers' that I have not been the only one.

There is a certain predestination that our ardent intellectualizations cannot compete with.

I cannot certainly speak for my male counterparts, but I think there is a certain parallel. .

There's a lot of "who would have thought she/he would have done that" in my conversations these days.

And yet, all the things happening to us have been repeated in one fashion or another since. . .

Unique on one hand we are, very mundane,and predictable on the other.

I couldn't imagine thirty.  I cannot imagine forty.

We never learn. No reason to imagine. Or predict. It does no good. And interferes with living.

There's a feeling of a need to resolve things.  Only I don't know precisely what.  That is probably something that persists into old age--if we make it there.

And what we wanted to resolve vaguely at twenty is different, and still I don't know how, from what  we want to resolve at twenty.  I think. But who the hell knows.

The complications are different, but the sense is the same.

I think I'm more scared of seeing aging in others, than in aging myself.

Watching people I care about, or admire, even afar, lose that essence.  The soul fading with the body.

Hard to believe almost being thirty makes me think of such things.

Sometimes I ache with the feeling of something more.

I am continuing this pot pourri of thoughts after my last phone call with you.  And I'm nearly finished.

In a peculiar way I'm looking forward to this interim period between young and middle age.  Only now am I coming to know who I am. 

I've never been ready to share myself with people, that is, it was always an effort.  Now it begins to feel right. I begin to have a physical and a psychological sense of me.  Slow learner.

Maybe that's best.

So, while being thirty frightens me because I feel how fast time is going and while old memories are still so fresh, there is that cliche sense of embarking on something new.

So, here's to something (perhaps not everything) we have in common, being thirty, and having known each other through our twenties.

It was fun.  And now for a new chapter.

I enclose a picture featuring my name on an office door.  Close as I've gotten to a credit, thus far, in Hollywoodland.

Love, DMG, Esq.