I'll Be Forty-Three on Friday

(How I'm Living Now)

I'm middle aged.  Been middle aged for a while.  A lotta guys my age and older say that that they don't look at themselves as being middle aged or old, but y'look at the calendar and y'can't deny it.  It's strange to realize it though.  But maybe I've got more reason to than some guys to find it hard to believe I'm in my 40s.  For one thing I haven't aged real fast physically; I'm in great shape.  But it has more to do with the fact that my life hasn't been clearly divided into stages.  Most people get married, buy a house, raise a family, become grandparents.  I had a battle station and a pair of mutant henchmen.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining.  I could be better, but things could be way worse too.  All things considered, I'm in pretty good shape.  At least I've got a gang of ninjas under my command.  It's been four years since I first dumped mutagen in the sewers and created those lousy turtles, and two years since they banished my battlestation to Dimension X.

It's strange though, when I'm in the middle of a giant plan to rid the world of April O'Neil I think it's my natural state, but when I'm just hiding out it all seems so far away - like I'll never try to steal the Reverse Polarity Magnet from Magno-Dyne labs again.  One thing Krang showed me was that I could be happy; that I had finite desires.  It was real important for me to realize that.  All my life until the business with Dimension X I'd been kind of depressed.  I mean, I had reason to be, but there were things I lacked, but still I knew people who, on paper anyway, were happier - Happiness is the bottom line, y'know.  I wondered if I was capable of being happy happy for even a few days in a row.  I was thinking, "Wow, maybe I'm really messed up."

But I was so happy when I thought an armada of starships in Dimension X were going to blow the Earth to smithereens, so happy that I didn't even mind that I needed the help of some robot-wearing warlord from another dimension.  I had a battle station, a clan of ninjas, and I felt great!  I had a battle station, access to another dimension, and I didn't think anything could defeat me.  Yeah, I got what I thought I needed and it turned out it really was what I needed, what a wonderful feeling!   It's like, y'know, when you're not used to building stuff, like you're not mechanically inclined, and you put something together from instructions in a book and you think you've done it right, but still you have no confidence.  So then you turn it on and it works.  Boy, what a rush!  I was happy when I was about to destroy the world, that meant I was o.k.

I must have gained confidence during that plan, because even after it was foiled I found I'd learned something, or I should say that something I'd known a long time word a groove and really penetrated into my head and I began to believe in it.  Anyway, I don't always have to defeat the turtles if I can destroy everything they love.

Like, we all need certain things in life and I've got to have a mutant rhino and warthog by my side, with a talking brain behind me.  I know I've tried to defeat the turtles a bunch of times and come up short, but that's not the point here.  THe point is that now, if the turtles tried to foil one of my plots, I'd focus on the plot instead of defeating the turtles.  They bore me now, they don't offer me anything.

So now what am I doing?  Lately I've been knocking over old ladies in the park and stealing their handbags.  I keep thinking "What is the purpose of life?"  Does it have a purpose?  Is everything we do meaningless?  Does it matter if you're happy or sad?  I mean a human life span is so short compared to eternity, a human being is so insignificant compared to...well, I take that back...How do I know how significant a guy like Einstein is?  Maybe he'll turn out to be real significant.

People have been asking for a long time where they stand in the cosmos; wondering if it matters whether they take one course or another when they're gonna die in a few decades anyway.  But stuff like that doesn't upset most people for too long, they can't conceive of nonexistence because for as long as they remember they've existed.  So, absurd as it really might be to believe it, we really think we're very important, regardless of how insignificant or short lived we are.  After all, we're the only ones living in our heads and in our skins.  Yeah, when things are going bad I try to rationalize them by thinking "Oh well, what'll it matter in a hundred years."  In a hundred years maybe it won't matter but the trouble is that in the next few hours or days or weeks it matters a lot.

If people really believed their actions were so meaningless, maybe they'd sit around doing nothing.  Maybe they wouldn't even have wars.  But then some would be bored.  It's good to work towards goals, do something constructive, just to keep from bein' bored, never mind what it'll mean in the twenty-fifth century.  So even a guy like mean who thinks about 'infinity' and 'eternity' once in a while is mainly caught up trying to run a gang of ninjas - to avoid boredom at least.

When I'm trying to keep the foot clan in line it's o.k.  Lately I've been so busy making sure shopkeepers pay protection that if I get five minutes to relax it's like a triumph.  Like I said, I'm finally starting to realize there's more to life than dining on Turtle Soup.  What do we need with each other?

I guess what I realize now is the reason I kept crafting plans that the Turtles would have to follow was loneliness.  I was on top of my own little mountain, and when they were trying to knock me off they at least acknowledged my accomplishment.  But as time goes on I'm getting increasingly inured to loneliness.

I mean I can always beat people up.  I start fights all the time now.  I'd much rather crush an underling than get hit in the face with a flat edge of a katana.  Whether teaching some foot clan member why I'm the boss will be the same comfort to me if I get to be 65 and friendless, I don't know.