Why I Hate Coldplay and then Compliments Addressed, the Silence, Birthdays, Ant Eaters

So today is exactly my 43rd birthday in the 26th iteration of my life. Not much bang, but there's not much buck, and, to be honest, how many knife fights with prostitutes is too much? The answer is one. One knife fight with anyone is probably too many. So I'm taking it on a lower key. Partially because I've had enough near death scrapes to make a fine scrap book of uniform crime reports and scars and partially because it sneaked up on me like a cat to a laser pointer's beam. I already had a midlife crisis. I'm still bouncing back from that. And to top it off, my latest scrape with my old friend was less of a scrape and more of a Houdini "how-the-hell-am-I-not-at-least-crippled-from-the-waist-down" kind of event and I'm not clapping my hands for an immediate encore.

43 feels the same as 42. The same as 41. Once you get over the major obstacle of realizing it's half over for all you have to offer, the rest is gravy. Things have been pleasantly silent. But I've been doing a lot of work to make it happen. Soused? Sometimes. The best thing about it is not the damage. Is not even the shortened life span, because I know I will pay for palatable living eventually, be it a massive med crash or the nick and chip of the slower knives offered by off the shelf substances, because all in all the final tally will sort itself out such that you cut years off the suffering (albeit by dying). The best thing about it is the silence. The knowing that you and only you are all present and mostly accounted for. That when people ask what you want to do, only one hand goes up in your head. When you ask yourself what to do next you hear one maybe two voices instead of ten.

I am still an anteater (fuck you). What I've also realized in the words of the illustrious coach Mike Tomlin is that the standard is the standard. I've been imagining Mike Tomlin covering my exploits in a post game/post week/post month press conference. He would probably say something like "an anteater is an anteater is an anteater. If we are anteaters it will show up on film and that film is our resume. Our resume speaks for itself. You either are an anteater or you aren't. There is no middle ground and when we can be anteaters it will show up in the work that we do." But I don't get press conference coverage. Or have coaches like Mike Tomlin, so I basically just tell myself when I don't get the outcome of my action 'dude, you're an anteater, what the hell did you think would happen?"

The silence has been nice though. I've been hanging the back end out there for almost too long though. Too many g's against tires whose grip I can never trust and part of me is waiting for the rubber to dissolve into the cloud of white smoke trumpeting from the rims for the naked rim to bite the asphalt like a starved dragon and flip my whole contraption so many times I'll be reduced to chunky tomato paste by the time it comes to halt on it's crumpled roof atop a sea of pelletized glass and unkempt infield next to the red and white rumble strips marking the path to the apex I should have targeted along the optimal path I could have taken had I the wiring and the vision and the opportunity to do so. So I enjoy the silence and try not to burn the envelope already torn to shreds back in high school when I realized my contents were not the sort of things that the postal service accepted as mail-able, transferable, items without special postage and allowances.

I did, however, receive a complement the other day from an older woman. It wasn't at all creepy. Not like the time I was walking back from the south side because the buses stopped running and I stopped at a bus stop just to read the schedule and make doubly sure and an old man who looked like Morgan Freeman after a bad Vegas weekend bender told me I was cute. That was creepy as hell. Plus I didn't know I was gay at the time so it was creepy and offensive and if I wasn't in a rush to rescue a friend from the clutches of a bad decision, but probably playing into her demand for a declaration of dedicated-ness by crossing town to get her, I probably would have stopped longer and been like "well, what the fuck is that supposed to mean, asshole?"

But anyway, I got a complement from an older lady the other day. She said I had a great smile. Now I have a prominent scar on my face that gashes from my eyebrow, down my cheek, and ends where my beard starts. I have a badly chipped front tooth from taking a dive onto cement. I have another scar from years ago where I took a similar dive, but broke my fall with my orbital bone instead of my mouth. And I have another set of scars from various head butts and several attempts to jump through a hallway's drywall ceiling. To have her see through that to that genuine grin she yanked out of me with her humor and honesty was touching. Because I mean she's got to be pushing 70, so she's seen her share of great smiles over the decades.

What was really touching about it is everyone says you're one in a million. That kind of phrasology, that kind of thought process, basically fires across the deck and no one blinks an eye. No one changes course. No one stands up and says "dear god, you are absolutely right! I must be wholly unique to this planet!" At least no one with half an ounce of sense. To believe that if you were able to gather together one million people, not a single one would have 99% of your interests, foibles, ticks, obsessions, addictions, and deficiencies in common is to be utterly blind to the simple fact that there are only so many configurations of expressibles. What differentiates then is the physical. That's what really makes you unique. So to have her say, whether true or not, off hand or not, that my smile sticks out in her nearly 7 decade long memory was totally awesome. It had me glowing while we made small talk. By the time she sauntered off I wondered if we would have gotten along just as well had she been 26 too, or if I'm the kind of person lovable only over fantastic spans of time and space.

Which is why I hate Coldplay. Not directly why. I hate Coldplay for the handful of fantastically cogent songs they've made. The songs that express the things people feel with uncanny accuracy, levity, and genius song writing. I hate Coldplay because I love their album with the figure of the guy with his head blown off on the cover, but I can't listen to it because of one song called The Scientist because the memories it brings back are still so raw and it describes those memories, the end of the formation of new memories just as good, with an intensity that is horrifically accurate it's like trying to sit down to a Rescue 911 marathon without a vomit bag for the blood, guts, bones, tears, and anguish you are about to see. It's not meant as a slight to them. it's good for them. Good for them for crafting something so intense. Good for them for wading through their own noise to get to the deep water. I guess I'm still doing that in many ways across several subjects. Assuming I don't drown first, but I'll keep kicking.


///Coldplay - "The Scientist" its not melodramatic. you have to put aside some of the common elements of regret to digest it, but those elements are, thankfully, few. but it speaks stories of information where so much pop is a glorified fragment blown out of proportion, chopped, and hashed with tons of loops and over production to fill the passage of time. ...going back to the start...