Thanks to the 50-plus people who partied with me last Friday as I became 50-plus. (No, I don’t have any pix. I’m not that self-centered.)

I don’t think of myself as an oldster. Some generous people have said I don’t look like one, either. Except for a strange craving for afternoon naps I started having last year, I still see myself as the frustrated ex-college student trying to get his life started already. (I was going to write that I still feel like a 25-year-old, but that didn’t mean I was going to get one.)

It turns out there’s one celebrity born on my day in my year: Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams. He even made a circuitous reference to his birthday in the strip published that day.

Other folks sharing the great six/eight include Frank Lloyd Wright, Jerry Stiller, Keenan Ivory Wayans, Kanye West, Nancy Sinatra, Sonia Braga (herself still fabulous), Griffin Dunne, Supreme Court Justice Byron White, Joan Rivers, Mariner Kenji Johjima, Picket Fences costar Kathy Baker, James Darren, Bernie Casey, Colin Baker, DNA researcher Francis Crick, and some obscure Brit named Tim Berners-Lee who thought up something called the World Wide Web.

(Alas, I also share my special day with My Lai killer William Calley and Satan-spawner Barbara Bush.)

A birthday, especially one that’s a nice round number, traditionally represents a good time to look back at things.

I remember a few things about my early years–watching that primitive, five-channel television (one of my lifelong loves); teaching myself to read newspapers at around age three-and-a-half (another of my lifelong loves); getting bullied by the older kids; leaving the bucolic outskirts of Olympia (long before That College was ever built) for the comparatively sterile foothills east of Marysville (long before its casino- and sprawl-driven boom); being bored to tears by school and household chores; repeatedly discovering that a jock town held no particular fondness for smart but un-athletic boys; finding little to no interest in most bad-boy style recreations (drinking, smoking, drugging, cussing, driving, fighting); feeling imprisoned out in the (then) countryside; wishing as hell that I was among real streets and sidewalks; sitting and squirming in the back seat of a ’57 Chevy station wagon (we eventually became a “Ford family”); finding and losing religion; seeing my first live rock concert (a promo gig at the opening of a new housing development with The New Yorkers, later known as the Hudson Brothers); and discovering sex at the exact same time that the mass media did (hence failing to learn the valuable lesson that my culture had been lying to me all this time).

And I remember the day we all went to the Seattle World’s Fair. I basked in a real city experience. I stared in awe at the attractions. I calculated I’d be in my forties when all these wonderful techno-utopian predictions would come to pass. (I don’t miss not having a flying car; but the peace, prosperity, and progress they promised would still be nice.)

I might have more on this later, but I don’t guarantee it.