Not Quite Birthday Wishes

They asked me if I know more about Cleveland than Los Angeles and I damn near choked on my drink because I am a native Angeleno, born and raised.

The City of Angels are inextricably linked together in the same but different way that someone once told me we are connected.

I know quite a bit about Cleveland but I have never been there and so the information I have comes from a few natives and transplants, some of whom once declared me the number one enemy.

At times I have sworn to never set foot there and at times I have promised to became a gazillionaire so I can buy a multitude of homes to tear down and rebuild so they look better.

Sometimes that has made certain people laugh and sometimes it has made them angry.

That is probably fitting because…well this is a family blog so I won’t say who or what, but they know and even if they are prone to engaging in revisionist history I know the truth. 🙂

Maybe it is the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end…who knows.

Not Quite Birthday Wishes

More than a few people have asked me if I have big plans for my birthday and I tell them all “NOPE.”

I have a few birthday wishes but you won’t find me sharing them here, at least not now and maybe not ever.

Can’t say if it is superstition and I fear saying them aloud will make them impossible to fill or if there are other reasons cuz I am not entirely sure.

At least a couple fall into the impossible without a genie or time machine and a few others are slotted in the improbable and unlikely spots of life’s roulette wheel.

So I am trying to go into it without expectations and if I am pleasantly surprised well than so be it.

It certainly won’t follow some of the ways I imagined things going so however it plays out life will be different than I had thought it might be.

Will that be better or worse?

Hell if I know, maybe neither and maybe both.

There is a long way to go before Wednesday hits and the one thing I am certain of is there are no huge surprise parties here for me.

That is not a subtle hint that I am pissed off or complaining because I am not a child and my friends/family are not billionaires who can drop everything and fly all over the country based upon a whim.

If I still lived in Los Angeles I would approach it all differently and maybe if I had a serious chunk of spare change I would do so in Dallas but neither is going to happen.

I am not in LA and though I have enough cash to pay my bills and occasionally do something special there isn’t so much extra that I can say it is time to take a big vacation.

Though I have spent the odd moment considering whether I want to go skydiving or engage in some other extreme sport.

A few years ago I got the chance to drive a Ferrari on a racetrack and played around with doing something like that again.

Truth is it was made even cooler by being something that I got do because of blogging as in I didn’t pay for it, I wrote a blog post about it.

So I have mulled over exploring doing that again but this time in a different car or doing one of those fighter jet dogfight experiences.

Truth is I have been so damn busy I haven’t had time to really think about if that is what I want and so I have sort of played more with the other unmentioned birthday wishes.

Don’t know why, but there is something about this moment that feels like the end of Gladiator.

There Was A Dream

Those a little and a lot older tell me that life got and or gets better after 50 so I stand here on the precipice, each day taking one more step towards the edge.

Soon I’ll cross the line and see what it is all about.

It is not about looking backwards and saying there was a dream but about looking at the present and the future and see the dreams ahead.

Time stand still
I’m not looking back
But I want to look around me now
Time stands still
See more of the people
And the places that surround me now

Time stands still

Freeze this moment
A little bit longer
Make each sensation
A little bit stronger