Getting older

I think maybe I'm driven to post this because I feel ill. It's only a cold, but I remember a time when I could shift a cold in a week. Having had this one for almost two weeks seems a bit cruel. I have to remember that I'm no longer sprightly and young. I am getting older. My thirty-first birthday looms this month. In mediaeval times I would be getting on a bit, would perhaps even be considered to be getting old.

It's not only the illness. As I get older I find that my tastes are narrower and I have less tolerance for bad art (although one may say that my own art is bad - be it my photos or my writing) because it is a waste of time, time that I will never regain. I now listen for about a minute to each track on an album and if nothing really grabs me it is consigned to the 'shite' column in my mental table. The number of books I've abandoned at around the hundred-page mark are countless. Even things I loved somewhat as a youth are not sacrosanct. With the exception of EMF's Stigma album and Blur's Modern Life Is Rubbish I don't really listen to any of the albums I listened to when I was sixteen. Books? Not even On The Road. Certainly not A Clockwork Orange.

If anything has remained, perhaps it's film. I've always liked something a bit different, although not contrived. Taxi Driver is still great. Demon Seed too. I loved those as a kid. The only thing that hasn't stuck is the love of blood and guts. I can't watch very violent horror whereas I could be glued to the screen as a kid, laughing at something like Brain Dead.

I'm going to make some tea before I go to work.