36.

I am 36 on Saturday. And in my head, what I am writing now is the beginning to this great movie that I am making. It’s this documentaryesque film that hazily hovers over the boundary between fiction and fact. It’s quiet, moody, insightful. It has frames of me driving to voiceovers like this one, my voice meandering its way through some familiar but obscure song – a deep cut you can’t recall hearing from an artist you thought you knew – and for whatever reason I am turning the steering wheel a lot, as if where ever I am going requires lots of hand over hand technique. It’s a voice over however, because though I am not talking to you, you need to be able to hear my thoughts. That’s the cool thing about those shots; they seem so intimate like there is a mic inside my head and I don’t know it. But I do know it, because I want you to know these things. I just don’t want to look at the camera and say them to you, the thousands, the millions of viewers I imagine watching me drive – my rhetorical bashfulness. And I know it’s quiet in the theater, or where ever you are watching, because it is in the car, and you want to hear what I am saying.
It’s the kind of film that will make you wonder if any of what I am saying is true, while at the same time thinking to yourself “that sounds just like him, just like his life,” even if you don’t know me.

I am 36 on Saturday, and this is the movie I want to start making, the movie I am pretending I am writing right now. This is the movie I think I have been thinking about for the last 36 years. Except for the fact that I don’t know what this movie is about. Not really.

I’ve got plenty to say. Plenty.

It could be about marriage. I have written about that a lot lately. I have had some transformative experiences in the last 10 years of marriage, and I am sure that I could put them together in a way that someone would find helpful. Not Steve Harvey helpful. Nor Dr. Phil. Not Deepak Chopra, either. More helpful in that Away We Go type way, the movie with Minnie Ripperton’s daughter. That film where the pregnant couple wanders around, metaphorically looking for their spiritual home, a center in and from which to raise their coming child, just as they realize the home they sought was actually the one in which one of them was raised. That “cock your head and blink your eyes and look again to see the world looking differently from this angle” help. I like that. Or maybe I would want to be helpful like a Zora Neale Hurston quote, eloquent and accessible - both effortless so. Subtle and yet bold like a Baldwin insight that slaps you in the face for having ignored it for so long. I would want to write those kinds of helpful things about marriage. I think I could do that. My wife would help me.

It could be about identity – especially the delicate process of knitting together national or communal identity. I can talk about that all day: The unforeseen consequences of the successfully assimilated 2nd generations; the invisible class warfare within ascending communities. It could be about making plain the phenomenon of the social construction of race, or the unfortunate fact that black and all the racial colors were and are in many ways still a reaction to the invention of whiteness, or maybe it’s the other way around. It’s definitely both. It could be about how becoming American means joining in the time honored rite of passage of killing your parents, figuratively of course – more of a cultural murder. My wife would not help me with this stuff. On this, I’d be on my own.
It could be about getting older. 1/3 life crisis stuff. Thirty-Something for the Forty-Somethings because people mature 10 years slower than they did in the 80s. It could be about the impossibility of adult authenticity. I could talk about how I don’t feel grown but how I am. How I am stuck between being Holden Caulfield or Old Spencer. Right? I am beyond scrubbing away all the FU’s in the world, but I still believe that the mark of a mature man is, actually, resignation, and I can’t just give up, sell out, and grow up like that. But, I don’t play video games so that protest seems a bit disingenuous for me. And I’m mad that somebody took hip-hop from me, but I’m over it, really. I have Van Hunt, K-os, and the 54. I mean, Brown Sugar, High Fidelity, and Garden State have already been made. If I made them again, they would just be Afro-hippy versions, which I must admit would be cooler. But that’s not the point.

There is so much I could talk about – so many things that are pertinent in my life right now: gentrification, being broke because of my choices and not my lack of opportunity -- as if I thought the lifestyle I was choosing was some monk like discipline (that sure was hyperbole). I could talk about Diaspora – map out through Facebook all the brown people I know, from all the places where there are brown people, and line their stories up to show how similar they are, or how impossibly different they are, to prove and disprove at the same time the universality of human suffering.

But I think what I really want to talk about is the fact that I am 36 on Saturday, and I don’t yet feel like I have done what it is I was meant to do. I feel like I have been moving that way, am on the right path, but here is my 36th year and I don’t know where “there” is yet. Once I thought I did. The world seemed so graciously theoretical at 22, so well designed. But at 36 there are components missing, whole bridges yet unconstructed that would make it possible to get there from here.

And so, I am writing this movie. This will be my door. Like Harold and the Purple crayon, I am drawing a jamb in your mind, in our collective minds, and I am walking through it. And I’m gonna say whatever needs saying.