The future looks bright?

The older I get, I find myself with things on my mind that I never would have conceived of ten years ago. True, I’m not old enough to have problems that are too big. My friends haven’t started to die off, and barring any kind of accident or act of violence, won’t for a couple more decades. But there are still things that get me a little worried, things that remind me that I too am getting older, and as my age progresses, that my body, society and nature will only let me down.

Like the cyst on my tailbone that fills with blood and puss every so often and swells to such painful proportions that I’ve had to get it lanced twice at the emergency room. When I first got it towards the end of college, I was concerned. I thought maybe I was getting cancer or maybe that I had developed some rare bone disease that was manifesting itself just inches above my ass. It turned out to be neither neither, just a cyst that’s not really rare because it plagues a lot of men, but not enough men to be common knowledge. After all, my dad did a pretty good job of letting me know what the future of being a man held, and what it meant in particular for man with the Brennaman name, and cyst above my ass was not one of them. But I deal with it.

However, what replaced the fear of the cyst being cancer or a bone disease was a constant fear of the cyst not draining on its own. Being lanced twice now, the cyst has proven to be more resilient than I first thought. There was a year long interval between the lances and after each one, the cyst slowly filled back up. The cyst hurts. When it fills, it hurts to sit, to walk, to lie on my back, to make any sudden movements or to even sneeze. Most of the time when the cyst fills, it’s been self draining. Nasty to be sure, but rarely is a trip to the hospital required.

But after two lancings I’m in a constant state of semi-fear that every time I feel a little swelling on the back side that this will be the time that I’ll have to go back to the hospital. I’m 26-years-old, and like an old man doing a mental check list every time a new ache shows up, I too wonder if this will be the day that I’m back at the hospital, ass in the air, waiting for a doctor to plunge a knife into my tailbone, only to refill it with several inches worth of gauze that I will have to pull out in a week’s time.

I’m also at that age where the future matters more than ever. It’s the number 30 that’s to blame. It’s a scary number that makes it official that, by all rights, you are no longer a child. In your 20s, you can still get away with being childish, indecisive and immature. In your 30s, the rules change and society says it’s time to get your shit together. A career needs to be settled on, or at least be in the process of beginning and people don’t really appreciate a 30-year-old man child. Or, at least, so I’m told.

30 is a scary age in that life, as society presents it, should be the time we’re finally settling down. Dreams and goals should be reevaluated, the dead weight cast aside in favor of a mortgage payment, children and well manicured front lawns.

I don’t want that, and so 30 can get lost. Yet, like a crazy mother-in-law, it refuses to. Like the cyst on my tailbone, that magic number creeps into my consciousness every now and again, letting me know that every day, it’s closer and closer. I try to laugh at 30. I tell it that I’m still more than three years away, to which 30 snickers while pointing to the last decade of my life and how that has sped by and at warp 9.9, that the times I thought would never end not only ended, but are rotting away in the grave yard of my memory.

And the big bang of life keeps everything expanding ever farther out. Friends that were a tight, luminous cluster are now speeding away from each other faster every year. People that were always going to be by your side call less and less, if at all, and you know, deep down, that that last time you were all together three years ago was the last time all of you will be in the same room ever again.

I’m like everyone else, though. I do my best not to think about things like that too often and go to my job, sit at my desk and make nice with the co-workers. I pretend that a few of them are my pals, but co-workers can never really be your friend, not like your old ones at least. How can they be? They never “knew you when,” and in the end, everyone that shares the carpet with you in your office is looking out for number one. Sure, you all complain about management at lunch, and promises are made about united fronts and “if you go I go,” but when the shit goes down, and it always does, those pacts all fall a part.

Change really is constant. Life is never the same and friends and family all go away.

But my cyst won’t. My cyst, like a bad marriage, will hold. No matter what happens in my life, my cyst will still be there, steadily filling with blood and puss, showing up when I least expect it. I could have it removed, but all the doctors have said chances are it’ll just come right back. So I’ve come to quietly appreciate it as my one constant. When everyone else is long gone, and I’m alone, sitting on the porch of the retirement home, it’ll be just me and the cyst, looking back at what life once was.