Today was my birthday.

If I am to feel like those who have gone before me, I believe today would be an apt occasion to begin a sordid and devastatingly personal relationship with dirt.

Problem is I have always liked dirt. Since my first crawl with the Tonka across that muddy old pit filled with sand. Is this then the dirt that demands more of my attentions to make the beast with 2 backs? Or is the patchouli oil I so fondly wore as a faerie king amongst the steelworks my relationship with dirt, and therefore my friendship with things soiled should have already ended?

I am not too sure. But apparently these will be my dirty years. The beginning of my infatuation with all things orgiastic, the continuance of an already keen respect for the delights of internet porn, and the sharpening of my sexual skills in preparation for the not unchallenging task of satisfying my woman when she enters her roaring 40’s.

Yes. I shall make her roar.

I ponder all this because I am grappling with our concept of age. It is not something one feels, physically or mentally. It is an abstract emotion designed to measure our time on this planet in some kind of rational measure. For all I know, and this can only ever be a mere percentile of all that is to be known, I am still a baby of the universe. In fact, I look at my child, who is not yet one, and I wonder whether he knows more than I. He communicates with one word across a spread of guttural and screaming intonations. He has simple wants and simple needs. He is not afraid of violence, yet wears a consistent smile. His content with simply being is unhampered without the armoury of the emotions that us ‘older’ people pick up along the way. For all I know, his physical age bears no resemblance to his spiritual age. He may well be a monk in the wrong country, an old whale trapped in the body of a nappy bound little guy, wondering how on earth he came back to this world to see war still happening, wankers still wankering, the sun still shining, and a full moon on his father’s dirty birthday.

If I am as old as the woman I feel, then I am older than my birthday hints at. If I am as old as the sum of all the women I have felt, I am older than Abraham ever could be, and perhaps this is not a point to boast on, but perhaps points to experience.

Is age indicative of experience? Hardly. I have lately been privy to the bitchiness and small mindedness of a 60-year-old woman who shares my own birthday. House-bound for nigh on 30 years she seems to have developed an unhealthy obsession with anal cleanliness and money. If this is a common trait of the old and wise, I wish not for such a future. If this is a case study of equating age with happiness then nothing could be further from the truth. My baby shits himself 5 times a day, vomits at will, and cannot walk; he is parent bound. Still he is happy. Age is certainly no quantifier of contentment.

Is age a goal? Keith Richards certainly thinks so. He recently said,  ‘the older I get, the older I want to get’. And why not? I don’t have a problem with getting old, training the wrinkles on my face to form the shadow of my laugh, and admonishing people for calling me Sir (if they still will when the generations of the latter alphabet grow up to inherit the world)…

Is age then a process? Yes. The old adage of the fine wine floats to mind after drinking a few beers. Should I then be drunk now? After 30 years? Should I be cellared and gather dust, crawl into a basement and wait for some eager punter to stumble upon me in the wee hours of some futuristic party and yell out ‘Fellas, there is one to drink now!’, at which I will jump to attention and prepare to be corked. Should those visions drink me now, or should I say wait, friends. I am still fruity, not yet mature, a little too ripe, too much alcohol on the nose.

Do we mellow with age? Probably not. I wouldn’t call my mind mellow. I wouldn’t know the definition. But I do know my place, and that is, I know that my place is not properly known. I care little for society. For people’s problems and those who try to solve them. I care little for government, being paid to understand chaos. I can sit on the edge of a 100 million year old cliff and realize that I am nothing.

If only the whole world could sit at Govett’s Leap in Blackheath and come to this realization. Could listen to the cliffs redden. Could feel that ‘who knows how old’ wind fizzle your hair and whisper:

I am old. You humans. You try to distinguish age. But you are not much really. Compare yourself to me. I dare you. I dare you for a few minutes of your busy lives to compare your age with mine. I think, we shall both agree, that your significance is not so much worth anything to be debated. And this is why you fight. Because you have never felt a river carve you up over millennia. You have never felt a tree take root in your loins. You have never stayed still long enough to let the moss grow upon you, you rolling stones. You roll, because you believe you understand the curve of the valley. You do not stay in water too long, because you believe it will age you, but you know not the meaning of the term.

Stop and look around you. Get out of your cities and listen.

So Birthdays. Pretty meaningless really.
 
Is it just another tool we have created to make sense of that which is senseless?
If I was religious would I celebrate more?

I celebrate everyday. On its own. Each blend. Each flavour. There is no birth. There is no death. There is no age. There is no past. There is no future. These are symbols of our own invention, to make us feel better about treating the world the way we do.

I have contemplated age and it is not mine that concerns me. Nor my parents. Nor the old people next year. There is no such thing as age in humans… Our minds simply could not compute.

There is no exactness, only the cliffs, the valleys, the gorges, the glaciers, the ocean. These are our family, and to them we shall return.

We are simply creatures of the world, and birthdays are another excuse to drink well of her juices.

And get dirty.

The soil I shall accumulate beneath my fingernails is the soil I return to.

Bring it on.