I write to you on the occasion of your 29th birthday, in order to inform you as to what you can expect when you turn 30. I know I haven't spoken with you since the occasion of your 17th birthday, when I felt a year's notice was time enough to prepare yourself for life after eighteen, and I feel that you will pay close heed to what I say now, since I was so accurate 9 years ago. Indeed, much of what I have to tell you now is thematically related to what I had to tell you then. For example, the invincibility which you discovered then is fading now, I'm sure, and when you turn 30 it will be gone entirely. Heart attacks, strokes, madmen with guns: all are not only possible now but likely, and the same fear which you tasted with relish when you were 18 will now make your mouth gritty and make displeasurable anything you care to consume.

Interesting, don't you think, this new medium, this e-mail that we have now? Do you recall the letter I sent you nine years ago, how I complained about the rising price of postage, how I mentioned that my ire at inflation was only assuaged by these new fangled word processors? Ironic, isn't it, that when you turn thirty nothing new will ever surface again? Right now, and in years past, you may have been on the verge of discovering new ideas, new ways of doing things, the very secrets of the universe- you only lacked the self-discipline and wisdom that comes with age and experience. It was that freshness, that lack of experience, my son, which made everything possible, made the newness of secrets and discoveries exciting enough to motivate you to investigate them. But when you turn thirty, and you discover those secrets, when you solve the riddles, when you are able to answer the question that you say if you could answer now, you would hold the world in your hand because you could show the world how to live righteously, at last; when you are thirty you will find these answers and you won't care to share them, you will be too tired. You won't care. You will be old enough to be able to decide that just having lived as long as you have is answer enough, and the meaning of life is not such a big deal after all.

Also, your penis will stop working. I can still remember, can you? when you were fourteen, and you were in junior high school, how you would go to school everyday, having just passed puberty, that is, old enough to appreciate sex, but not old enough to have it, and you would stare today at the head of the cheerleading squad, her tiny breasts brushing the inside of her t-shirt in a way that you knew only you could appreciate, other loutish boys fixated on big jugs and tight asses, but only you caring about the way a partly post-pubescent girl's nipples were caressed by the cotton weave and that gaze of your owned acne scarred eyes. Do you remember? I do, how on another day you'd catch yourself looking at the seems on the jeans of your history teacher who was perhaps not a bit overweight since she was thirty-five years old after all, and perhaps she wore more make-up than the young ladies and supermodels in the movies and on the Mtv that you habitually daydreamed about, but in that reality of her jeans crotch seam you'd find yourself lost and thinking about the sort of sex that didn't involve manly muscles and creamy flesh and coos and gasps but the kind of sex that involved smells and a sore back and noticing the imperfection of the teeth and the split ends on the pillow; you were actually quite forward looking at those moments, weren't you son? And you'll recall I'm sure how I told you that when you turned eighteen that hard-on you'd had since 14 would finally get some service, and not just from a red and water-rough hand but actually from the girl who sat with you on the bus, a clumsy affair at first but that by the time you were nineteen you would consider yourself an old pro and that when on your twenty-first birthday you'd finally found enough courage to give alcohol the respect it deserves that you would use it as your best friend and confidant on nights when you couldn't bare the thought of watching three am television, and instead stumbled over to this ex girlfriend's house or more likely that ex-girlfriend's ex best friend's house to stumble through a window, offer a swig from one bottle or another, and then quietly sneak away two hours later, safe in the thought that you could call back seven to ten days later if the TV was once again too oppressive to be your pal for the night.

And it really is magic, the way your penis will stop working now; I mean if on the occasion of the night before your 30 birthday you were to take that bottle one more time and drink up enough bone to stick down your spine and ask the lady with the least annoying giggle at the bar if her self esteem is low enough to manage a night in your arms instead of the arms of someone more deserving, someone who was, say only 25, if you do this and manage to get it up at the stroke of midnight and plunge into a place that is no longer manicured and no longer attended to on a daily basis like an athlete who exercises in order to achieve peak performance on demand, you will find that once tumescence has set in a few minutes later it will not ever ever go away, not at all, and all of the magazines and internet cruising and filthy movies rented from the mom and pop will be able to get you to a point where you can make the man rise, anymore than the next time you bring a lady back to your underwear-strewn apartment. This is a guarantee. You will have shot yours for the last time.

I'm sure it feels just like yesterday, that time you were so horny you actually brushed the captain of the debate team on the back side there in eighth grade and then whacked off in the bathroom between phys-ed and algebra, thinking about her smallish eighth grade ass and her flat chest and the things you'd like to do to her once she got her braces off, a trace memory which surfaced a few years into college one evening while entertaining your girlfriend's little sister while she ran some errand or another, and you found yourself as acutely embarrassed to accidentally think about an actually sex partner's little sister, seven years your junior, as embarrassed as you were the very moment after you ejaculated into the boys room toilet there in the junior school, how filthy you felt, how incredibly dirty and loathsome and worthy of the zits on your face, even though it was not enough to keep you from doing it again, later, when at 23 you took a plane ride on the occasion of interviewing for a job that didn't pan out, only because it was the weirdness of the timing how your horniness hit you and the coincidence of having seen up the skirt of the stewardess as she sat in the special stewardess seat as the plane landed, a quick flask of the tan crotch of her all-day pantyhose and you were in that deserted, four in the morning, airplane bathroom trying to convince your pecker to do what it had done four day before in your apartment bathroom, to do what it had done about three weeks before that when you made love for the last time to the same girlfriend who had the sister who reminded you of your disgustingness in junior high that one time, only that one time you swear to god, that same girlfriend who you had to dump because she herself wanted to have sex with your ex best friend, a guy who you confessed to about the junior high jack off but did it when he was so drunk that he probably doesn't remember it at all, although from reports from the ex-girlfriend he doesn't remember their encounter either and in retrospect she admits it wasn't worth dumping you for but then again the idea of still being with you isn't that exciting anyway, which is just as well because you didn't have as much of a complication when you slept with her ex-best-friend a bit after the finally accomplished airport bathroom masturbation session, in fact, it was talking about jacking off in public that broke the ice not melted by alcohol between you and led to a night of something between those fantasies you had as a lad about the cheerleader and the ones about the history teacher.

Those days are over, I'm afraid. What's in store for in the days ahead in place of the constant sexual activity is the slow realization that you will die, and die soon. Whereas when you were five years old the very idea of a year was nearly infinite, harnessed only by the knowledge of an impending birthday before that year had passed, now you will look forward to thirty more years disappearing in the blink of an eye, and ironically, those same birthdays which you thought were agonizingly far away will now flit by with so much speed as to confuse you as to what your precise age is, although you'll always know what it is because it will be a negative number now, that is, the number of years you have left to live.

You will have muscles that ache when you wake up to look forward to, and not only after a hard day playing sand volleyball with your friends, but after a few minutes at the gym to work off that new-found delight in twinkies, and it will be a muscle ache that you cannot tough out, that doesn't make you limp with pride for a few hours, but an ache that sets in for a long spell and haunts you for the better part of a week. You'll become addicted to pain killers, not because they make you feel good but because you think they make you feel less bad. When you turn thirty, my son, that will be the definition of good or nice or happy or contented: not what is, but what isn't, isn't bad, unhappy, uncomfortable.

And probably the most depressing aspect of all this is that you will accept it. You will not question your infirmity. When you hit 35 or so and have the typical mid-life crisis, only then will you know that it is a crisis for everyone except you; for you, it will just be an excuse to act a little eccentric, as a rite of passage into old age. I do not know who had the first alleged mid-life crisis, but we should thank him for setting us up for our own last tired sowing of oats before we lose the energy to even care anymore.

I trust, my son, that you will take what I say to heart. I look forward to writing to you again when you are imminently 60, and we can discuss the slow failures of your organs and your mind, the impending senility and dementia, the inability to control your bladder, and such like. That will be a fine time, the golden years, as they say.

Be that as it may, I remain, yours sincerely

Father