I had my first mid-life crisis aged five. There's rarely a specific reason for these things, perhaps they're indicative of a rotten core of unhappiness, but the reasons are never as interesting as what happens. I bought myself a shiny car, started dating women half my age, my dress sense became laughable - you wouldn't believe some of the things I used to wear - and to top it all off, I took to wearing a wig. Who did I think I was kidding? One day I had short black hair, and the next day it was purple and nylon? How obvious is that? With hindsight, it's scary how pathetic I was.
Crises have no cause on arrival or departure, and I was left all alone aged six, shunning my floozies, car, clothes, hair. Life progressed, flowing, cascading, washing. Semblances were bubbling to the surface, and sticking. Years. Then questions, doubts: if my mid-life crisis was at five, death must come at ten. I took to smoking cigars, not the quality Cuban cigars, just the cheapest, nastiest ones that were available. Death was coming, and there was no point being clean and pure. This was my lowest ebb; I was nine and smoking about eighty cigars a day, hating every second of it, hating every second of me. People became fed up of my antics: whenever we went anywhere, I'd have a cigar in my hand. One of my friends became so exacerbated that one day, amidst shouting and swearing, he told me that he much preferred me when I was going through my mid-life crisis. His words stuck with me, because he took the trouble to write them out on a piece of paper, and stick them to my clothes; many people wouldn't have bothered, but I'm glad he did. Not a day goes by that I don't silently thank him for that. He's dead now. Hit by a runaway boxer. Very messy.
I had the words "mid-life crisis" floating around my head and my clothes. Mid-life crisis. A crisis in the middle of my life. I'd signed my death warrant by having one so young, but what was to stop me having another now? A happy regression providing a stay of execution. I had to go all out this time; I'd been there before, the standards had been set back in the day, but now I needed to raise the bar even if I'd crash through it and have to pick fibreglass out of my back. I bought a shiny car and polish, I insisted the women I dated were exactly half my age, down to the very day, my clothes became less blue than last time, I put gel in my hair. I thought I was uncomfortably straddling the boundary of parody, but it worked because I got through ten without dying.
My teenage years were spent fraught with worry about how I could surpass nine when I saved my life at seventeen, so much so that when I reached seventeen I was so depressed I didn't mind if I died or not. I just sat quietly and waited for eighteen to hit, but it never did, and then one day I woke up happy again. I recounted my story to a social mathematician that I know (it's not that she's friendly, but that Social Mathematics is her field of expertise), and she suggested that mid-life crises aged five and nine added up to death at twenty eight. Here I sit, on the cusp of life, wondering whether to worry about how to do better again, or whether to make the most of the next seven years, live them, and perhaps hope that science can come up with a new virulent strain of mid-life crisis. My head says the latter, but my heart says worry... well, actually it just says thump thump thumpetty thump thump, but I can read it like a book.