The Domestic Terrorist

THE BIG 3-0

As I fast approach the Big Three-Oh, the number 30, I realise certain things.

Firstly, as R Kelly will tell you, age ain�t nothing but a number baby.

Secondly, I will never be cool. I probably wasn�t then, when I had the chance, so there�s no way I will be a decade on.

Thirdly, your Twenties are shite. Can�t be helped.

Fourthly, I am Turning Into My Dad.

It�s only a matter of time before I grow a moustache and end up with an overgrown hairdo that looks like a Playdough head overcranked with mouldable, non-toxic putty.

It�s only a matter of time before I start listening to Kraftwerk and Pink Floyd, get nostalgic over long-lost formats of music reproduction (such as Compact Discs), and think about buying a home. Investing in some bricks. And you know, by the time my Dad was my age, was married with children.

Now, I haven�t got any children that I know of, but I�ve found it shocking that people have recently started asking me if I have children, and how travelling for business will affect my seeing them growing up. They look surprised when I tell them I don�t have children. I don�t actually know what�s worse ; that they expect me to have children, or that I don�t have any.

Tick tock. Time is marching onward, forever onward. Wrinkles are advancing down my face like invading armies. The forces of moisturising lotion and haircuts won�t keep them back forever, or even for long. Hairs are slowly defecting and turning grey in the sun. I just don�t know how much longer it will be until I look like a hollow, empty husk of a man. Not long. But by then I won�t care. I�ll just be grateful to have a working set of arms and legs.

Still, no matter my age, at least I won�t be trying to be �Down With The Kids�. I was never cool then, and I certainly won�t be in the future. It�s satistically impossible to get cooler with age. Not even if you�re Dennis Hopper, or Michael Caine, or Samuel L Jackson. You won�t see me down the clubs dancing to the latest shit in the charts, wearing a backwards baseball cap, or sporting a bootleg Limp Biskit top. Limp Biskit are so �00. It�s The Vines these days. Or it�s The Hives. Or it�s The Strokes. Or it�s The The.

Is it? Who cares? Next year it�ll be some other band, some bunch of kids sucking on the nipple of past trends, copying bands who were copying other people, still saying nothing of importance, still lacking the spark of genius that comes with talent. I�ve just seen too many average bands heralded as the Next Big Thing to really care. And so have the guys behind the counter at Music & Video Exchange ; they don�t buy Sleeper records anymore.

Just leave me with my dad�s old Pink Floyd and Kraftwerk records, and I�ll put you in touch with my inner OAP, whose currently queuing on telephone lines to pay �300 for Rolling Stones tickets to see them play Twickenham Cricket Ground. Which is about as rock n roll as anyone approaching sixty can hope to be. I can�t get no satisfaction.

But I�m only half that age. What will I be like at sixty? Going to see U2 at the local enormodrome, paying (with inflation added on) �500 a ticket to see seventy year old�s play songs they wrote half a century ago? Will I be telling my grandchildren I knew people who�d seen The Beatles? Will they yawn? Or swoon? Or will they tell me to shut up whilst they�re playing with their Atari 3D PlayHelmet?

Will I have suffered a mid-life crisis (given the advances in modern technology, the average lifespan could soon escalate to 150), and left my fifth wife for a schoolgirl again? Or a pupae? Is that my inner child?

Age just keeps on rolling. You can�t turn back time. Cher knows it, and it shows in her plastic face. No plastic surgery for me. No chance : I won�t cheat the mirror. I won�t get a plastic smile. Well, alright, not unless I�m in a car accident or something horrid where I�ll be some kind of 50�s monster begging demented scientists to rebuild my face. But the clock keeps ticking.

I�m fast approaching middle age. I�m on collision course and I can�t do anything to avoid it. I�m on a countdown towards being definitively no longer Young. You can kind of fool people at the age of 27 that you�re just straddling the gap of youth and middle age, even though age is clearly winning the war (if not the battle). But what if you don�t want a war? What if, to use a US phrase, you�re a weasel who quite likes the idea of giving in to superior numbers? Numbers that start with the Big 3-0?

But I can�t say I�ll be sad to leave my twenties. As a decade, it was fairly rubbish. I had some awful haircuts (though I�m inclined to say that that wasn�t the fault of the decade but of my undisciplined hair), there were some awful fashions, some even worse music, a few deaths, some dreadful jobs and plenty of regrettable events - an awful, ill-conceived, stillborn marriage, being the biggest. There was a string of broken relationships and broken hearts - mostly mine.

So I face my thirties hopeful. Not that my life will magically start (it�s already underway), nor that I will somehow have all my problems solved. Instead, I enter my thirties hopeful that things will generally carry on improving at the rate they have over the past year or so : that is, drastically and in leaps and bounds.

I�ll eventually crawl out of debt and find some degree of financial solvency � though I�d like to point out that at least �22,000 of my debts have been caused by former partners who have a somewhat cavalier attitude to their responsibilities. I might find a haircut I like. I�ve already found some good clothes. And some good friends. Quite a few of my old ones weren�t friends at all. That�s why I don�t know them any more, and they�re not exactly missed.

So what�s it all about? It�s not a moan or whinge. I�m going to be 30 in six weeks, and I still haven�t been in Las Vegas. I�ve been married, separated, broken, spat out, shat upon, raped by love, abused by trust, and had to be strong because of the weakness of others, but I�m a survivor. Vote for me on ITV. Bring on the wrinkles. Bring on old age. I can take it.

Because after my twenties, whatever happens next is going to be easy. I�ll get me slippers and me pipe.

Hosted by www.Geocities.ws