By Jeff Smith HE WAS ASLEEP and then he was awake. The italics are from Utah Blaine, a pretty good dime novel by Louis L'Amour. I think the best of L'Amour's oeuvre ranks right up there with Spillane, Collins and the giants of pulp fiction. This particular lede stands head and shoulders with "Call me Ishmael," and "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." And since I don't remember anything specific about the moment of my birth--which was 50 years ago tomorrow, hence this autobiographical essay--it struck me as a suitable intro. Those of us lucky enough to celebrate a semi-centennial birthday only get to do it once. So a few ruminations on a life of incidental enlightenment are not entirely out of order. Grin and bear it; someday you could get this antiquated. First of all I will not burden you with the usual wheeze about how if I'd known I was going to live this long I'd have taken better care of myself. Once I got through puberty and voted McGovern for president I had a pretty good hunch I wasn't going the way of James Dean. Most of us court the romantic fantasy that we're too fast to live, too young to die, bye bye, but few of us have fear and pain thresholds high enough to be life-threatening. I drank a gallon of Ripple one night in my teens and barfed up everything down to my kneebones, but that's about as close as I came to getting dead until I was into my mid-30s. By that time, I wanted to spend a lot of time rocking on the front porch watching my grandkids, and every now and then calling one over kind of conspiratorially and saying, "Pull my finger." But that seemed a long way off then and it still does. Which is a good thing because it denotes the expectation of a long, happy and eventual future. And connotes an overall mind-set of continuing youth. I don't think this is unique to me, nor even unusual. Large numbers of my generation--and I am one of the original Baby Boomers--are showing a marked reticence in growing up. Which is why I don't feel 50. The only clues I have as to how feeling 50 is supposed to feel are those I gleaned from my parents and their friends, all of whom were grown-ups in every sense of the term for as long as I can remember. Back in 1967, when my mom hit 50, my wise-ass brother Dave gave her a card that said, "The first half-century is always the hardest." She damn near beat the snot out of him. I mean as close as a mother can come to beating the snot out of a 30-year-old man without laying a hand on him. What she actually did was she laughed out loud and then called him some variation of a horse's butt. But I thought, "Damn. She is a half a century old." My dad was 52 by then and he'd been told he was going to die when he was 21. Not die eventually, die within months. Of tuberculosis. He didn't, but he nearly did again when he was 30, which is why I was born in Tucson instead of Presque Isle, Maine. And all his life the world kept spitting at him and missing, shitting at him and hitting. So even though Dad was a wiry old bird, and chipper, he seemed real, real, grown-up to me because he'd had a hard life. And Mom, because she lived hers with him. And then lived through the Depression. And World War II, Korea...all that. Their generation, even if they weren't in bad health or broke, even if everything was blue skies and green lights, was supposed to act like Ozzie and Harriet, which meant kind of wholesome and dorky and totally grown up. You know...old. My generation is still smoking dope, doing aerobics and pumping iron, and searching for the perfectly timed orgasm. And these avocations are not necessarily the pathetic last-gasps of a senile subculture unwilling or unable to come to grips with reality. Reality is that we probably are going to live several decades more, and that as long as we're along for this ride, we might as well enjoy it. And stay healthy enough to make it under our own steam. I suppose the thing that astounds me most about reaching the golden anniversary of my nativity is that it likewise marks the 28th year since I walked into the newsroom of The Arizona Daily Star and asked Frank Johnson where I should set my coffee cup. I was a grown man, or so I thought at the time, married, out of college and newly employed at an actual grown-up job. The kind where they take money out of your check for Social Security. The kind where you call the mayor and ask him what the hell did he think he was doing, biting that woman on the thigh, back in Washington, D.C., anyhow? I remember looking around the newsroom at all the old hands--men and women with gray hair and nicotine-stained fingers, and wisdom, experience...history on their brows--and realizing I'd entered the world of my parents' generation. And their parents. A world where you paid taxes and bought groceries and made mortgage payments and maybe put a little aside for retirement. Yeah, right. I would never be as old as Dave Brinegar, or even Larry Ferguson. But I am. And then again, I'm not. Things are different for some of us. Some of us didn't grow up, move up, become assistant city editors and begin eyeing our opportunities to shuffle along the corporate treadmill. Some of us got to bite society in its fat, complacent ass, and developed a taste for blood. One of those guys was me, and I was lucky enough to land in a job that encourages this sort of thing. The Weekly, like New Times in Phoenix and similar tabloids across the country, grew out of the underground college press of the late '60s and early '70s, the replacement generation that ordinarily would have driven us out of our jobs and out to pasture fell in large part under the spell of Reagan-era materialism, with the result that us early Baby Boomers have had the opportunity to keep on truckin'. And I for one intend to. Until the wheels fall off.

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