In the Midcourse of Our Life

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I've been thinking too much about being nearly 40. So much that when I actually turn 40 in three months, it'll be an anti-climax.

But it is the traditional half-way-probably-ish point in life, when you take stock of what you've done, ask what you should have done, and try to work out what to do with the remaining half.

So here's Kapitano's incomplete list of things at 40.

Things I want to start doing

* Have a regular income. Not a career, not a place on the corporate ladder, just a job that involves doing something useful and pays enough for a small apartment, and maybe an occasional drug habit.

Things I want to stop doing

* Hang around with a bunch of middle-class radicals.

There's actually quite a lot of lifelong socialists around - it's just that most of them burned out after five or ten years giving all their free time, money and strength organising campaigns on orders from head office. Which rewards them with exhortations to 'Keep up the good work', ie. demands to give even more.

Not all burn out - some leave after asking inconvenient questions about policy flipflops, and getting called a lot of rude names instead of an answer. I've been called most of them: Positivist, Idealist, Empiricist, Menshevik, Accomodationist, Ultraleftist and 'Objectively Right-Wing'.

Theologins exist to invent justifications for current church practices by scouring the holy books, and socialist party hacks do essentially the same job. Unfortunately for both, there's always a few parishoners who decide to read the books for themselves, and after a decade of listening to hacks, that's been me.

* Wank off into webcams. The other thing I've spent a decade doing is trying to get off to the sight of strangers trying to get off to the sight of me getting off. While both of us have porn running in another window - which is what we're actually watching.

Of all the reasons to have any kind of sex, a vague need for approval is among the worst. And the most common. It also tends to ruin the sex.

Things I want to keep doing

* Make music - but lots more of it. And better.

Things I want to resume doing

* Proper blogging!

* Programming. My first few jobs (and qualifications) involved programming computers. I dropped out in 1994 on realising I didn't want to spend my life making updates no one needs to programs no one uses for companies no one likes.

But sometimes it is useful being able to write a little program to do something highly specific but very tedious to do manually, even if you only have to run it every few months.

So out of the hundreds of languages introduced since '94, I'm thinking of the one named after an old british comedy sketch show. One that was never as funny as it used to be.

Things I still don't want to do

* Have a family, mortgage, and a bunch of simpering pseudo-friends who make racist remarks at each other's dinner parties in between talking bullshit about the wine.

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