Happy Birthday to me, I'm 5 years past 33, Happy Birthday dear my-self, Happy Birthday to me. Yes, that's right ... tomorrow (April 27) marks my 38th year in this world, and, my God!, where did it all go? What have I done these past 38 years? I might be able to excuse myself for having no recollection of the first 2 or 3, but what happened to the other 36 or 38? Memory is a terrible thing; you know that you ought to be able to recall more of your life than you can because you know memory works, but try as you might, you can rarely do more than bring forward ghostly fragments of what we should loosely refer to as "history". It is only by the use of aids like photographs, movies, journals, the words of friends that you have any chance of recounting the past to yourself. The question is, though, of what value is too much memory? In a very abstract way you are living memory and the culmination of many histories, but you are only present in the moment. Even when your thoughts wander backward or forward, you have only control over right now, so why squander it on so much cloud searching? Memory informs us of things we have done, seen done, or done to others. It is the imperfect sense history of life as it has been lived by us. Do you remember the first time you read a particular book and how it changed your life? Strange that you can do that - to be able to recall an act as fundamentally passive as reading, or smelling, something in which you were changed, rather than being the agent of change. You cannot always be the actor. Sometimes, through no fault or choice of your own, you become the object of an event. You try to cross the street in front of a bus and get run down by a bicyclist carrying an empty gas can on a busy road. Wow, that would be emberassing if it ever happened to someone ...

I'm not sure how it is possible to judge whether this life has been well lived. I'm not sure it's really important to know whether it has been, or whether living life well is important. I feel, from eatrly years of parochial indoctrination that there is such a thing as a well lived life, but is it true in the way that 2 + 2 = 4 is true? So much hinges on our ability to hum it away. Why deal with those awefully uncomfortable questions when you can turn the music up just a bit louder, stare at the sky just a bit longer, or cram another sour tot into your gub? Self reflection takes time and work, and above all, a sincere desire to undersrand yourself. It has, over the decards, gotten a bad reputation as something only students of philosophy engage in between flipped burgers at fast-food joints. It has become the realm of the nerd, geek or intollerably precious men. Women (whoa there) I think, reflect on it less than men. I have no real data on which to base this statement other than my gut, and my gut has got shit for brains (pop culture reference #1).

This queet meandering is mostly about my feeble and failed attempts to tally 38 years' worth of living and excuse myself of the rather slovenly way I've done it. This is not to say that I've done a poor job of it, but that I think I would have liked to do a better job of it, but why waste time on the past when the future is still wide open?