Mid-life Crisis Man

I tried many things. I tried a myriad of self-help books, tapes, sessions and circles of people with similar problems, but like the triangle schemes they kept insisting weren’t triangle schemes, I failed. I tried a quote of the day for a time and that kept me going for a while, but it just came back to this. There were times when I perked up, times when I was down, times when I was neither, but it always came back in the end, back to a spot of immovability, like the sort of sleep paralysis that set off all those alien abduction stories you used to hear about. This is my line and I walk it. Not straying, more streamlined and almost perfect. But I still get the itch, sometimes in the shower, sometimes on the toilet in the middle of a bathroom epiphany I’ll soon forget. Take a run through the park, jog it off, but it still insists on making its presence known. There’s not much I can do about it, no way that I can stop it. I can learn to live with it. I can put it to the back of my mind, which could actually be the front of my mind, but I won’t go into the logistical topography of my brain right now. I’m dealing with it, let’s put it that way.1

I might find myself in a bar one evening, a band might be playing, playing songs I don’t tend to like, but I’m here. I’m drinking white wine from a glass, wearing an old stuffy suit and perspiring like crazy, wishing I’d sprayed on deodorant before coming, but I’m here. The odd one out, a piece of the puzzle that doesn’t fit, some other overused proverb, a skunk according to one of the fellow patrons; I guess my hair fits that description too. They can laugh; they’ll one day be me. Then I’d laugh if I wasn’t already dead. They’ll one day come to lose an identity and seek a new one for themselves or do unusual things, end up in random places, wake up middle aged and married with grown up kids and frequent their cellar regularly.2

Because this is no ordinary man. I go down and put on the costume acquired from the novelty shop and I go under a miraculous transformation and live the dream of the superhero: ‘‘I’m Batman, I’m Spiderman, I’m Superman’’. I’m Mid-life Crisis Man. I’m fighting crime and especially my arch-nemesis: Water Bastard. An epic battle ensues and an overtly American voice-over plays running commentary, we exchange a few cliché one-liners between punches and then he drowns me. The cold reality is another splash in the face from the water, from the glass, from the arm of my wife standing over and peering down at me on a chair in the cellar in my cheap wet generic superhero costume. It’s at times like this that I’m glad to be alive.3