…but yr. web-editor just might (repeat, might) have had either a panic attack or a “silent” heart attack late Monday night.

It was at the long-belated end of an extremely long and extremely stressful day, in which I’d found myself gasping for breath to the point of giggling. By the time I finally got home around 11:30, I felt intense pain in my lower abdomen and left shoulder (but not further down either arm). I tried to relax enough to sleep, but only kept getting more tense. At the episode’s nadir, I had to fight to breathe and felt searing pain when I did.

But then I finally did relax enough to sleep, which I did until 2 p.m. Tuesday. Since then, I’ve continued to maintain my regular activities (applying for jobs, writing, schmoozing, shopping). But some shoulder pain has remained, and intense headaches have come and gone.

At no point in any of this has my heartbeat felt too slow, too fast, or erratic.

I still don’t know what happenned. I might not until sometime next week. But for now, I’m trying to take things easy. So I might not see y’all at Bumbershoot ’03. But please rest assured I’m alive and more-or-less well now.

SO AT THE AGE OF approximately 46 and a half, I’ve finally had an intimation of mortality. Until this week, I’d been holding onto the pseudo-invulnerability of youth all this time. Long-term friends have gone bald, had kids, undergone nasty divorces, won Emmys or Pulitzers, or moved to Germany. A few have passed on, due to everything from suicide and drugs to cancer and HIV. Others have valiantly fought back in the face of doom and become stronger, wiser people.

I never wanted to become middle aged. I’d always associated it with those annoying guys whose lives had essentially ended at the end of The Sixties, and who ever since wouldn’t stop alleging that Their Generation was some sort of superior species. I’d planned to stay sprightly and open to new ideas. Either that or become an unabashed crochety old geezer. (My short-lived Tablet column was even titled Back In My Day, Sonny.)

Nowadays, there are at least some role models out there for ’80s-generation fellas growing older, if not gracefully, at least forcefully. Elvis Costello, and to a lesser extent Joe Jackson, are making some of the most provocative music of their careers. Locally, so are Kim Warnick (in Visqueen) and Scott McCaughey (in the Minus Five). Peter Bagge’s comics and Charles Peterson’s photographs keep getting better.

This time has not come for me to, as Charles Aznavour sang, “pay for yesterday when I was young.” It is time for me to start seriously considering what I wanna really, really do with what I fully expect to be the many, many more years I’ve got.