Hodie

Today is the day that I have officially outlived my father. My Dad dropped dead at 52. When dawn's rosy fingers high fived the People's Republic of Hillcrest-or something-this morning I was 53.

Granted, waking up dead sometime before this morning was not one of my larger morbid dreads. As I have said before, I'm in better shape than most guys 10 years younger than myself. Unlike my father, I don't use tobacco products and I'm not married to a crazy person nor do I live with a bunch of children underfoot.

But still, as a doctor friend of mine says, " That shit will weigh upon your mind." And so it has.

My friend Jenny, who knows me about as well as anybody asked me the other day, " Well, what are you gonna obsess about now?" This implies that I have been something of a pain-in-the-ass for the previous 52 years. Hmmph. This is not true. Buck checked out when I was a senior in college. So I have only been a pain the ass for @ 23 years.

Laura the Lawyer has invited me to take upon myself her obsessive ruminations about her teenaged daughters. No thanks. If I am going to obsess about something it will be something relatively simple like nuclear proliferation or banking regulations. In a similar vein, Jennifer Hansen from the Democrat-Gazette suggests that I obsess over the economy. Might as well. Most of us obsess over things we have absolutely no control anyway. Upon the suggestion of a thrift-minded colleague, I have started buying a less expensive brand of gin for household use. This is what passes for financial planning for me.

On second thought, maybe I won't obsess about anything ever again unless it involves golf. Maybe I will get a dog instead. Who knows? I'm over the big hurdle. Which of course means that it is all downhill from here in a very real sense.

Great. Way to go me.

Thank goodness I have lots of stuff to do in the interim. Going to play golf with my brothers this morning. Sure, it's at War Memorial but it beats working. Or blogging for that matter. Going out for dinner tonight and watching the Razorback game tomorrow. Have lunches and dinners planned all next week. If this birthday is like the other recent ones, I will come back from golf to find bottles of whiskey on the porch. I will be a fat drunk by next Friday. But then again, my friend Renee Horton pointed out last year that I was a skinny drunk up until then.

Still am.

Enough of this. Time to go play golf and walk on the course that my father used to play.

I'll leave the obsessing to next week.