The Winchester

August 13 , 2007. This is the day I will be turning thirty years old. Thirty years. That's quite a long time to have spent alive. Three decades. 33.33333333% of a century. Six counts of five years. More days than I plan on calculating. More than a third of my life passed, as I don't fully expect to reach ninety years old. If I do, I'll come back here and edit this entry. I know people tend to worry or freak out or tense up or enter a complete state of denial about getting older. For some reason, it scares them. I guess for some people it's the One Year Closer To Death thing. Others, maybe it's a longing for the days of youth, what with little to no responsibility. True, when you're young the only things you really need to worry about what time Mom said to come home, and whether or not Dad will leave a dirty mag lying around that you can sequester yourself with for a few days. Perhaps it has to do with what one perceives as their own physical attracti...

So I guess when you get older, you're just allowed to not know how things work. I was on my way back from getting dinner tonight, and I passed by two older folks getting out of their car after parking on the side of the road by a parking meter. This road has parking meters, which is the reason I am writing this entry you are currently loving the shit out of. So they got out, and both of them walked up to the parking meter. Parking meters have apparently been around since the 1930's, the first of which was installed in Oklahoma City in '35. This says to me that everyone, at least in the United States, knows what a parking meter is and has at least seen someone work it. Which is why it struck me as odd that both of these old folks looked at the thing like it just sprung up next to their car when they parked at might at any time jump out at them and rob them of their social security checks. Maybe they watched too much Get Smart and thought perhaps there was a secret age...