AGE 27 SEASON MUSINGS

When you are young you are invariably stupid, because you are so sure that the dumb and underdeveloped intuitions percolating in your silly little head are the correct and the only possible way to interpret the world, of which you are the center. Every social and/or legal milestone - 16, 18, 21, even the rarely considered 65 - seem like they will never arrive, and that seems so unfair, because you know everything you'll ever need to know, now that you've engaged in some awkward heavy petting in between heats at the track meet, now that you've read five pages of Nitchze, now that you are aware movies exist outside of comic book and toy properties.   

Eventually - and "eventually" arrives before you know it, of course, nothing in life happens as if properly calibrated - you're legally responsible for all your actions, up to and especially including your overdraft fees. Still, now you can finally buy your own goddamn liquor and cigarettes. You are free to share living space with a couple of fellows (or ladies, or a combo thereof). You can have a bunch of great ideas for websites, none of which will ever generate a profit. If a companion shares your bed for an evening, if you are attractive or pleasant or funny or persistent enough in the eyes of another, who the fuck is going to bother you about it? The Pope? How could he know, unless he was some kind of Spy Pope? Who would suspect the Pope is a spy?

The insipid overconfidence of youth begins its metamorphosis into something richer. You mature if you are doing things right. If you are doing things wrong, you are libel to curdle, to become a caricature of arrested development, lacking in self-awareness and generosity of spirit. Most people do things kind of right and kind of wrong, because most people are basically wonderful and beautiful things, capable of bringing overwhelming joy to those that love them, catastrophically flawed in some minor way that isn't of much concern to their friends and loves.

Before long, the passing milestones cease to have legal ramifications, but my stars, the physic ramifications can brutalize.

The first thing this writer noticed as he entered his mid 20's was the NBA Draft was populated solely by people younger than he. A few years later, it dawned on him that the Beatles had already filmed Hard Day's Night and Help! when they were a little younger, in aggregate, than he was that day. He remembered reading a biography of Orson Wells as a 14 year-old youngster and thinking to himself how weird it was that the man was considered a "boy genius" when he didn't make Citizen Kane as a boy; why, he was already 26 years old! Wells should've been balls deep into his grotesquely strange career by then! 

At 26, this writer was well aware he wasn't ever going to make a Citizen Kane - he wasn't even in the running to be "the Lester Bangs of videogames," which was the closest he was to being a thing, much to his chagrin - and to his satisfaction, if he's honest with himself. 

Then came 27. As the writer knows well, this is a big one. The Age 27 Season. As legendary baseball analysis and inventor of sabermetrics Bill James discovered in one of his yearly Baseball Abstracts, the age 27 season is almost always the best year of a player's career. The player has seen pretty much all there is to see, and he has learned from his 3000+ at-bats or pitches. Best of all, his body has yet to break down, and can still withstand the many strange, violent and unnatural motions that make baseball the thing it is. 

Will my Age 27 Season be the best of my life career? Maybe. Maybe not. I've found a lot of comfort thinking that it will be totally okay either way. If this is the year I become a Great Dane, wearing eight chains, I think I could handle the success. If nothing much changes, and I'm still searching my couch cushions for quarters, even knowing I'd already mined that vein dry, I won't be too bummed out. I have so many people who genuinely enjoy spending time with me, and I already have the guitars and keyboards and organs that make me so happy when I use them I can't even fathom it. I feel a bit like Adam Scott's character on Party Down, okay with settling for what works, but not entirely comfortable staying still.

All I need now is a Lizzy Caplin. Or a Kristen Bell, but she's kind of a bitch on Party Down. Now, a Veronica Mars... is out of my league. So are Lizzy Caplin & Kristen Bell. 

Also, seriously. Why do I still have celebrity crushes, like a 14 year old girl? You know what else bothers me? People who get bummed out at a celebrity marriage or pregnancy.  Christ, like you were going to get Natalie Portman pregnant.