Overbearing Mother Nature

My abstract fear of entering my thirties has lain me paralyzed. Getting out of bed is a game of roulette. Do I dare? “Welcome one, welcome all to the Broadway hit: Drama in Pjamas! It’s the post quarter life crisis nihilists dream of.” Cue teenage emo intro music, angst resurfacing in full form.

Where I live in Venice Beach, we’re faced daily with iterations of our own mortality, esoterically from watching the flow of the ocean tides and quite literally as an eighty- year-old homeless woman flashes her tits in public. Will that be me? I’ve always said I want to save the fun stuff for when I’m old, like trying heroine or skydiving. So, I could very well end up like her: on the bad side of a bad trip. But I imagined I’d have a support system set up and a healthy 401k in the event my parachute doesn’t inflate.

I’m heading into my thirties alongside millennials who are equally ill equip for the future: selfie-makers and crypto punks whose parents told them they could be anything they wanted to be in life... And I’m terrified. This terror is the monster hiding under my bead, connivingly hitting my snooze alarm each morning. It’s those extra five minutes of sleep that always turn into thirty—no pun intended.

This terror of being in my (gulp) thirties is equal parts healthy and unnerving. It inspired me to quit drinking three years ago, thinking I needed my wits about me to navigate these uncharted waters. But, it paralyzes me in a web of uncertainty. If I were more successful I’d abate this terror with a new Ferrari, naming it “Noel 2.0,” drowning every itch of discomfort in revs of my engine, and that would be that.

Thirty is the morning after an all night sexcapade. The handcuffs are tied, but we’ve lost the key. The roaring twenties are over. Welcome to the reality of adulthood. Where childhood fantasies play out in real time... sometimes like a bad dream. Where conscious uncoupling of past traumas leads to grim realizations of our current reality: after spending a decade in therapy we don’t have our parents to blame. These choices or lack thereof are now our own.

On a recent flight home from a standup comedy tour, I basked in successfully circumventing these thoughts of aging by making fart jokes on stage to strangers. Take that Mother Nature! Forgetting she bears a striking resemblance to my overbearing Italian mother, who’s constantly butting in, I gloated in my window seat. Staring out at pink cotton candy clouds, I mulled over the logistics of eternal youth. Until, finally, Mother Nature had to get a word in.

My back went out, suddenly and quite inexplicably. Mother Nature always had a flare for the dramatic. To abate the excruciating pain, I laid flat on the floor in the back of the plane, behind an elderly group, who leaped over me every hour to use the bathroom. An eighty-year-old sympathized, “Are you okay, sweetie?” as he sprung from his seat. Clearly we’re in Act Three of Drama in Pjamas! Plot twist: Mother Nature’s the villain, chastising me for clinging to youth. Welcome to your thirties!

My only condolence is from my dog who’s equally lazy but for different reasons. Her soft snores are both reassuring and disheartening, signaling the passage of time. We lay in bed together, simmering in the summer heat like a pair of overcooked hot dogs, curling into ourselves with each occasional ocean breeze. I hear Mother Nature humming in the wind wafting through my window, judging my procrastination, saying: “Honey, hiding won’t stop time. Embrace the new decade!”

Welcome to your thirties! Okay, I say. Okay. I walk outside, flash my tits to the eighty-year-old homeless woman flashing hers back at me, and all is well in the world. Nature is restored to balance.