Today an old girlfriend, someone whom I have not seen for ten years this month, turned 40. I remember all my old girfriends' birthdays; unfortunately this does not not require a prodigious memory. I met the young woman in question when she was 22 and I 25 years old. For fairly commonplace reasons things lingered a few years but didn't quite ignite--a sort of Jovian gas giant of a romance. And then the thing was mercifully put to death at the hands of the woman who would later become my wife, shortly after we met, eleven years ago. Now, there's no one to whom I can tell this. Certainly not my dear wife. Yet here it is for all the world to see, a very fitting memorial to the one who will always remain young in my thoughts.

Blah, blah, blah...don't get too broken up about it now. It's your own damn fault. You didn't really want it. You always had your eyes turned outward...otherward. So don't blather on about it. You could have chosen to marry against the wishes of your family. That's what you ended up doing in the end, taking the inevitable estrangement like a man. And in the end it wouldn't have been so bad, if you were with her today, you 42 and she 40. Or WOULD IT? The old "what if I bent over to pick up a penny in the street" argument. I mean, one little thing can lead to a chain of consequences completely unlike the world that would have existed had that little thing not been done. E.g., the man who stopped for a haircut on September 11. So why berate yourself for paths not taken? You're HERE and NOW, contentedly homey and middle-aged. And you're no surfer boy yourself, you FAT, BALD FART. So be happy that you're not out there sending money to that jerk with a ponytail who sells that running machine on TV, and trying to decide between Bosley Medical and Hair Club for men...or using Clairol Just for Men hair coloring on your beard! No, she'll take ya "...just the way you are. Dum dee dee, dum dee dee, dum dee dee, dum dum dee dee dee!" Of course that is an oblique reference to the sax riff at the end of the Billy Joel song.

But that'll get me going on how much I hate hearing about (and being) AGING BOOMERS. For example, "Aging Boomers at Sea with Digital Music" or "Aging Boomers Propping Up CD Sales," referring to greatest hits collections from artists like The Beatles, Eagles, Billy Joel? Doggone it, I've got 3000 mp3's on my machine, and I like a fair percentage of current music. To be fair, only about 10 percent of music "back then" was really worth listening to, yet after 30 years, one tends to remember the best, so of course it will always have been "better in the old days." But I know that, and keep that in mine when I'm listening to the pop station in my town and liking one song in ten. "Perhaps," the cynic would say, "perhaps 'current' music is your version of the souped up car of one's youth lovingly restored in middle age." Hmmmm... perhaps! I'm sure it's what the neighbors say when I drive up the cul-de-sac with the windows of my bland, middle-of-the-road, 6-year-old Japanese mid-size down blaring the latest 50-Cent or Beyonce. One thing that HASN'T changed since my youth: My musical tastes lean strongly to the dark side! And of course I used to think they were all white people doing the music I liked when I was a kid...white GIRLS in the case of groups, like the Stylistics, that employed falsetto singing. I'm sure I wasn't the only white kid from suburbia to think that then.