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Repost - Slicing Time. 4/16/2004

I was shuffling through my hard disk, getting rid of the chaff, when I found this in my archives. It first appeared in my first attempt at a blog, sometime in April of 2004.

Another weekend over. As I get older, I have begun to realise just how fast time seems to pass. Days and weeks and months fly past in a never ending blur. A short while ago, at the beginning of the year, just after Christmas and before the New Year began, I was lamenting my annual bonus, or rather the lack thereof. We’re cutting costs, they said. We have no new work coming in, they said. And thus I saw my plans of getting a new toy dashed. And that was 3 months ago. A quarter. 0.25. Where did the time go? What happened to it? What do I have to show for it?

I’m trying hard not to go apeshit. I realise that I am no longer the person I once was. My priorities are different now. I can actually do mortgage interest payment calculations in my head, for one thing. And I seem to be spending inordinate amounts of time in furniture shops and art galleries. I guess I now qualify for old fart status.

I just hope I don’t end up to be like some men I know, who drive Porsches and Ferraris, and pick up female companions young enough to be their daughters, trying to fend off male menopause, hanging on to the vestiges of a lost youth. A good friend of mine, who happens to be, let us say, comfortable, chucked his wife of 25 years, bought himself a superbike, and started chasing skirts. We looked on in amusement, until we realised that this man was desperate, and depressed. He had so many regrets.

Over conversation and beer, he admitted to us that he had regretted many things in his life, and his extreme change of lifestyle was his way of repudiating the fact that the Grim Reaper would be calling upon him in a matter of years, as he will come for us all. I pointed out to him that most of us choose to ride because we want to, not because we need to impress the ladies, but he wasn’t listening. All he wanted was the kind of lifestyle he wanted to have when he was young, and Hugh Hefner’s method of treating women was considered cool. May have worked in the 70s buddy, ain’t gonna work now. He wanted to do ‘things’ before he shuffled off this mortal coil.

Which made me take stock of my life. At a time when New Romantics were in, my contempararies were having serious relationships, getting married, buying houses, making babies. I, on the other hand, didn’t give a flying fuck about my future. I had a job which paid absolutely unreal money, and was bouncing all over the world. The work was dangerous, and the pay scales reflected it. And thus we spent money like there was no tomorrow, which for some of us, was absolutely true. I lived a lifestyle which many of my friends, then and now, were envious of. Which wasn’t what I wanted. I saw some of them coming home, to a nice house, and wife, and kids. And I wanted it. I wanted their stability. I wanted their life, as they wanted mine. The grass is always greener.

But the main thing…I never ever fucking regretted a single thing I ever did. All decisions I made, right or wrong, I live with today. The consequences of some of those decisions are still haunting me. I chose, and I live with it.

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