For some reason I seem to know a lot of scorpios, and they all seem to be having momentous birthdays this year. 

Well, 35 is really not that big a deal, if you'll pardon me for saying, although usually by that year you can't fake like you're a stranger to your thirties anymore.  The old, Where am I?  How did I get here?  What does it all mean? shtick is wearing pretty thin. 

By 35 you find, somewhat to your surprise, probably, that 25 year-olds sort of bore you.  You still wouldn't mind having sex with them, but you don't want to have to humor them by pretending you're interested in them otherwise.  It's too much work, it can be expensive, and it's wasted flattery to boot.  But you might still have a chance.

In comparison 40 does seem forbidding, somehow.  Most of my friends are in their forties, so don't anybody flame me for agism here.  Forty-somethings: don't risk another hernia getting riled over it.  And don't any twenty-somethings write in to tell me, "I'm hot for older guys," either.  I'm not interested.  Forty doesn't frighten me.  I don't hate it.  From what I've seen of it, the fifth decade is packed full of at least as much mystery and wonder as the ones preceding it.  I, personally, like a seasoned mind, so long as the heart hasn't been pickled in the process.  So I'm looking forward to it, myself—in three years, mind you.  Anyway, what's the alternative?

All that aside, forty still seems like the other side of something, doesn't it? It may just be a number, but as such it's a convenient milestone—right around the midway point—along life's long and winding road.  And we all know where that road leads.  

(Johnny Cash is singing in the background right now: "You can run on for a long time/Sooner or later God'll cut you down."  Coincidence?  I think not.)

But my point here is, what do you get someone—a friend, you know, from your circle of friends—for their fortieth?  I'm talking just a token here, a little something when you show up at the party to pay your respects. 

I'm toying with the idea of picking up a copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Crack Up," for him.  Fitzgerald wrote it when he was forty.  Here's some of what he had to say about it at the time:

...I began to realize that for two years my life had been drawing on resources I did not possess, that I had been mortgaging myself physically and spiritually up to the hilt. What was the small gift of life given back in comparison to that?—when there had once been a pride of direction and a confidence in enduring independence.

I realized that in those two years, in order to preserve something—an inner hush maybe, maybe not—I had weaned myself from all the things I used to love—that every act of life from the morning tooth-brush to the friend at dinner had become an effort. I saw that for a long time I had not liked people and things, but only followed the rickety old pretense of liking.  I saw that even my love for those closest to me was become only an attempt to love, that my casual relations—with an editor, a tobacco seller, the child of a friend, were only what I remembered I should do, from other days.  All in the same month I became bitter about such things as the sound of the radio, the advertisements in the magazines, the screech of tracks, the dead silence of the country—contemptuous of human softness, immediately (if secretly) quarrelsome toward hardness—hating the night when I couldn't sleep and hating the day because it went toward night...

...Trying to cling to something...

And so on.

I'm there, Scott!  I'm right there!

But honestly, I don't know if I should foist my early mid-life crisis (which I have been going through for about the last fifteen years, by the sounds of it) on my friend, just for being forty.  But the truth of the matter is, by forty you can't deny you're feeling the strain.  I mean, the ordinary strain of living.  Or, you can deny it, but it becomes less plausible to do so.  At any rate, somehow you can identify with some of what Fitzgerald's written here. 

It's either that or the funeral spray made of black roses.  I have until Saturday night to make up my mind.