40 Part One

As I approach the age of 40, I've been good about not viewing it as a vast, black monolith on the horizon, filled with mystery and mortality. I've always looked forward to aging. When I was young I understood completely that adulthood brought opportunity; more dough too. When I turn 40 I predict, internally, I'll feel like I'll at last be taken seriously by the world at large, even if only bureaucratically. I'll enter a Mercedes car dealership and ask for a test drive without hesitation. I'll speak up at town hall meetings, and no one will say, "My God, will someone please tell that child to sit down!?!" I also look forward to random muscle pains after working in the yard all day. And the flatulence. Oh heavens yes, the flatulence.

I won't be in the market for a 'vette, nor will a desire to cruise community colleges for suburban trixies overcome me.

However.

The one touch of middle-age crazy that's afflicted me is a desire to recover a few things I threw away or forgot about over the years. They've been popping out of my subconscious every now and again—buoyant gewgaws long trapped beneath my mind's shipwrecks and coral reefs, now bobbing freely across the surface. This mental phenomenon, as you may know, is the raison d'être for eBay, a marketplace not of goods but of memories.

In truth, these missing and abandoned items are useless to me now. I owned them, I've experienced them, and I can't recreate the sensations I felt the first time I held them in my hands, closets, or mouth—no matter what Proust might have you believe. As William S. Burroughs pointed out, there's no point asking the Devil for eternal youth: in order to feel 18 you have to be eighteen. A 40-year-old man can't return to that state. As Burroughs crudely put it, "The old fool sold his soul for a strap-on."

Yet, I want these things. They're symbols of periods of calm, pleasantness, newness, excitement—dare I say happiness? Nah. Save for a space between 1993 and 1994, my past has few truly miserable periods. Largely I've led a placid existence, with a little imaginary drama injected into it by my overactive imagination. A little more travel, fewer poisonous individuals in my life, a scosch more confidence in myself would have been nice—but even in my dreariest periods I was never really unhappy with being Dan Kelly. Still, these symbols, these items, represent periods when I had something I enjoyed and was devoted to.

The fact that they're usually silly-ass pop cultural trinkets is besides the point.

So, what are they?

What do you think they are?

And he left it at that.