This week I will turn 40. To mark the occasion, my editor has persuaded me to write a semi-regular column chronicling my impending midlife crisis and the everyday experiences of a ruggedly handsome man teetering on the fulcrum between birth and death.
Since I come from hearty stock, there is a good chance I will live at least another 40 or 70 years, but undoubtedly those years will feel shorter as each one becomes an increasingly smaller and less fruitful percentage of my entire life span. Now I know how R.E.M. must have felt before they broke up.
In honour of this auspicious occasion, I decided to grow a beard. Although I live in a neighbourhood where beards are a common sight, they tend to grow on dudes 10 years younger and several skinny-jean sizes smaller than me.
I began growing my face fuzz on Christmas day with the end shave-date slated for my birthday two months later. My reasoning was two-fold: I wanted to grow a decent beard for once in my underachieving life, and when I finally shaved the horrible, rust-coloured thing off, it would symbolize my rebirth as a smooth-faced 40-year-old man. Although I haven't seen the film, I believe this is the plot of Benjamin Button. After nearly two months, I look like a syphilis-free Henry VIII, and on more than one occasion I've met the curious gaze of co-workers wondering if the drapes matched the carpet. They don't by the way.
The only other time I grew a beard was in 2008 for the Courier's Peter Ballard Classic beard growing contest. We named the one-month beard-off after our publisher who had just been fired after 30 years, and the event brought the workplace closer together in the way competition and trash talk often does. Although my surprisingly red and itchy outgrowth easily took the vibrancy category, it was no match for the overall coverage of columnist Mark Hasiuk and his libertarian follicles. It was a bitter pill to swallow.
Speaking of bitter pills, after a quick and depressing Google search, I learned that the average life expectancy of a blue whale is 40 years — same goes for multinational corporations and Fortune 500 companies. One website erroneously claimed that horses, pigs and cows live an average of 40 years. But upon further inspection, they tend to clock out at 27, alongside their hard-living brethren Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse.
Twenty-seven is also the average age of retirement for NHL players, although there are a handful currently 40 or over. But since none of them are in the three hockey pools I obsess over daily, I have no idea how well those old fogies are doing.
According to Statistics Canada, seven per cent of the country's population is between 40 and 44, though as a demographic we tend to fall outside the catchment area of most TV shows, movies, popular music, videogames and recreational drugs.
When my father was 40, he was in the midst of his own midlife crisis, having just separated from my mother and nursing a serious addiction to Bruce Hornsby and the Range, Toto's classic album Toto IV and, for some reason, Jan Hammer's Miami Vice Soundtrack. I can only surmise that synthesizers and listening to the mandolin rain as she runs away soothed my father's 40-year-old angst-ridden soul. At the same time, he had three kids, a mortgage and a job he had been at for 15 years and would retire from 20 years later.
I have none of those things. Unless I move out of Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»or get rid of half of everything I own and purchase a sedan-sized condo, I will be a renter for the foreseeable future. I work in an ever-unstable industry in which I have difficulty imagining myself reaching retirement age. And my partner of umpteen years, depending on the gravitational pull of the moon, wavers between wanting kids and announcing her ovaries have turned to dust whenever she hears a child snivelling on the bus or blowing a gasket in Whole Foods.
So for the time being, my beard and I are going to wait and see where things sort themselves out in that department. I'm in no hurry. I've got the rest of my life ahead of me.
Michael Kissinger is 39-years-and-364-days-old.
