By the time you read this, I’ll be forty. As I write I’m still 39. These facts are as inescapable as the near statistical certainty that when this column comes out, some of you will be dead. Of course, none of you dead ones will be reading this. I’m sure there’s a lesson in there somewhere, but honestly, I can’t be bothered.

Until pretty recently, I was fairly sanguine about what coy son’s of bitches often call ‘The Big Four Oh’. At least I think I was, but I’m not sure I’m using the word correctly. I could look it up, but then you might mistakenly conclude I care. It’s just the kind of big word that throughout my thirties I’ve tossed around to leave people with the impression I’m ‘smart’. I know the word’s Latinate root means ‘blood’, but if I’m totally truthful here, as someone entering their forth decade ought to be, I have no idea if ‘Sanguis’ is the root word. I just wanted to use ‘Latinate’ in a sentence. Plus, I don’t even know if that’s a Latin word at all, let alone what it means. By the time you read this, that kind of posturing will be damned immature of me. So, since relatively speaking, I remain in your recent past, I’m going to ‘heap my plate’ with ‘goodies’ from the ‘Puerile Buffet’. Puerile, from the Latin ‘Puer’, which means ‘boy’. I think. And if it doesn’t, I don’t give a little tine crap.

To return to my point (and I promise to do that much more regularly by the time you read this) I’d been doing just fine with the whole notion of a forth decade of misery on the dunghill which is modern life. And then I got a pink slip. First one in my life. I admit, not getting a real job until I was thirty helped me set that record, but that was in my youth. I am putting away youthful things, now. Like health benefits. And wages. And a place to go five days a week. Forty I could deal with. Forty and unemployed? A little harder.

As I write this, I’m proud as hell to be part of the biggest upsurge in unemployment since 1991, or whatever the hell that statistic was I heard on the radio. Of course, by the time you read this I will be drunk, unshaven, weeping and hiding from my wife. I will also be wearing the same clothes I’m wearing right now. I mean, we all have to grow up sometime, right? Let’s face it, there’s going to have to be some belt tightening around Casa Burbank. The job market is not what it was when I was 39.

By the time you read this, my chance to be a ‘Young Turk’ or ‘Enfant Terrible’ will have irrevocably passed. There is some debate within my family about whether forty is too young to become a ‘Late Bloomer’. I hold the opinion that 45 is the threshold of that status while my wife favors the idea that my chances of being struck by a bus are quite a bit better than my ‘blooming’ into ‘anything’. Of course, she has a little time left before she has to face her mortality the way I’m sure I will be by the time you read this. A very little time. Measured in months. To say exactly how many would be just plain cruel in a way I will have given up by the time you read this. Six.

I recall thinking forty was terribly old. Now I’m pretty sure it falls neatly into the last chunk of being a ‘young man’. Sixty, now that’s old. Fifty? Just ‘man’. A ‘man of fifty’. As in ‘He died a man of fifty’. By the time you read this I won’t stoop to trying to pass that quote off as being from a work of literature you ought to have read.

I had brief hopes of wearing my unemployment as a badge of youth, like a very loud Hawaiian shirt or using a disposable lighter to ignite bodily gasses. Then I imagined them asking me what kind of insurance I had as the EMT’s cut away the scorched remains of my Hawaiian shirt to get at the third degree burns caused by burning back and ass hair.

As I’m sure you are all aware, some of you painfully so, I’m not alone. They even have a delightful new word for us. We are ‘Midcareers’. The warm feeling in my chest must be what Bums felt as they metamorphosed into ‘The Homeless’.

One word of caution. Anyone thinking of sending me a gag card or gift, Over the Hill Pills, "Life Begins at 40...BEGINS TO SUCK!", that sort of thing? Err on the late side. Because if I get it while I’m still 39 and employed? I’ll beat the crap out of you. And that’s something I certainly wouldn’t do by the time you read this.

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