I turned 40 today, yes, the big 4-0, and I’m rather surprised that a mere digit has had any effect on me at all, I’m not surprised that it has had so little, I’ve had enough close brushes with death to know what to expect, a long downhill run, and that’s if I’m lucky. Over the decades I’ve spent consuming narcotics and talking to bemused looking strangers about anything under the sun I’ve learned a thing or two. The biggest lesson I’ve learnt is that there are no easy answers…

When you’re young, no I’m not talking young at heart here, I’m talking real quantifiable time spent alive, most preferably on Earth. When you’re young there are moments when you may feel the world is your oyster. If it is, I’m glad for you, grab that pearl and run like the clappers, if you don’t the next scrap of a thing who passes by will nab the goodies and stick two fingers up at you as they fly by in their new limo, or rocket ship, or on the shoulders of their cheering entourage after topping the charts, or selling a winning pitch to a Hollywood player, or some such dumb luck story of fame and fortune.

Something you won’t want to do is think, I mean yes you should think, you should think hey I had better not step out into speeding traffic, or perhaps I won’t kick that generic authority figure in the family jewels. Just don’t think too long and too hard about anything and everything or you might just find yourself writing a similar blog post to this one in a few years from now.

I’ve tried or rather experimented with life, in between the stints at compulsive narcotic inebriation and philosophical discourse,. Over a decade ago I wrote a sci-fi script that was "almost" picked up by someone or other at Fox Searchlight. Unfortunately, for my bank balance and my early if not rather naïve ambitions for fame and glory there were two major stumbling blocks.

1) The script was overtly erotic – movie execs don’t like sex or at least not publicly – however abstract the context in which the act is placed.

2) The name of the film was "Milkman". Coincidentally the script for Kevin Costner’s awful Hollywood flop "The Postman" was doing the rounds at the same time. Now the two films couldn’t be further apart, I have never liked Costner, his drab and hackneyed approach to both acting and direction leaves me cold, however at least the public finally caught up with my opinion once they’d seen his trite attempt at a vision of the future.

Incidentally mine involved reducing men to cattle, they were held in enormous warehouses and their groins attached to pumps, their brains chemically induced into coma, and their "milk" was collected for a burgeoning sperm bank enterprise that satisfied women’s need to create life whilst avoiding the messy business of mixing with the male gender of the human species.

When decanting my life I can see the strings of disparate identities that now lay dormant in my wake and wonder who the hell those guys were, but I suppose with the benefit of hindsight and the mockery of a belief in the linear temporal construct I have the advantage over those poor fools. Another me, another Paul from the past decided he wanted to be a music producer, so he spent a year training to be just that at Point Blank, London. All he had to show for it was a room crammed with digital technology that was destined to be defunct within another year, a collection of temporary deadbeat friends with more money, or rather with parents with more money than sense, and of course, more memories. Oh so precious memories to add to the collection, the colourful threads that do weave my life’s tapestry so inexorably, so predictably I could die.

In between those periods of productivity have been a few regrettable careers, from factory worker to graphic designer and back again. I spent a day working at an abattoir, I was a vegetarian at the time; and when the head butcher, a De Niro/Taxi Driver style brute with blood-splattered machete in hand tore into the stomachs of a dead cow; hanging aloft from a rusty chain, before pointing at the nearby wheelbarrow, which supposedly I was meant to wheel under the gushing intestines and shovel in a spadeful at a time, I heaved, I wretched. I then disposed of the previous night’s Quorn and Soya before promptly walking out.

I’ve experienced a month of nervous breakdowns whilst attempting to keep pace with coke heads at a London magazine publishers, Haymarket Publishing in Lancaster Gate, a Heseltine consortium, a buzzing wasp’s nest of greed, avarice and low pay. I was supposed to sell space and on occasion help with the marketing for Campaign Magazine, a well known ad rag foisted upon unsuspecting MD’s and directors the length and breadth of Britain. I could never get my head around the fact that someone would spend thousands of pounds on a postage-stamp sized box at the back of a free publication, and I suspect mainly unread pile of glossy claptrap, but then again as my boss at the time said I was looking at it from an artist’s point of view, which for him was as distasteful as it gets.

I’ve spent a few years here and there in various loony bins, they too were an eye-opener, and perhaps contributed to the abandonment of all "Beta Paul’s", all of those whom have preceded me, this Paul, the 40 year old cynic of life, love and being in all its twists and turns of fate is most likely the Alpha.

I’m lucky in many ways, I create art, finally, I am free to do what gives me purpose on this planet, however little it may appear to me or you. I am with a woman I love. I have a decent place to live, unlike many of the hovels I have frequented in the past. I am coherent, my mind is just about intact, I am as yet not dying of any excruciating disease, although I wouldn’t be surprised if one is lurking around the corner in the next decade looking at my past consumptions. I am not totally bitter, I have the intelligence to reason my thought processes through most problems that life throws at me, I even have the energy to attempt to achieve what I want to in life.

But yes, I have left it very late, very very late. Perhaps I could consider my mind, my life’s experience, the events in all their ghastly and beautiful vision, an essential key to what I do now and how I do it. Then again I could be kidding myself, unless I change the world, for the better, in some miraculous way or other, I most probably am. I would describe myself as a human pressure-cooker, except this hotpot on the constant boil isn’t gunning for a fight, or willing everyone he meets to join his revolution, no, I am simply an artist. Creating images that put paid to the incongruencies, the contradictions that my media-fuelled, televisual, two-dimensional slipstream of a life has decided to place in my path.

I don’t believe in coincidence, I have met some who do, frighteningly illogical logical types, then there’s those who don’t, and they’re worse. Everything has a reason, if it’s not God it must be quantum physics or the result of some kind of failed random number experiment run by a secret government. My theory, if it can be given such a title, is rather more simple. I had made a decision, the moment I could think I must have made a choice, and from that choice, don’t ask me what, my memory is good but not godlike, whatever it was, it span off an immeasurable branching of other choices; decisions, reactions, conclusions, progressions and regressions. That first decision led me finally to the last, which involved staying up all night on the last day of my 39th year on this planet, waiting until 7am, and then proceeding to badger you with my most innermost thoughts.

My mother says I had tried to run away at around 9 months old, or rather crawl. A neighbour finally found me rolling around her garden, she lived four or five houses down from us, I had probably decided that she had had a better life than my painfully young (at the time) mother and father.

I was more decisive then than I am now. The moment i could drag myself along the ground I did it with gusto, I admire that first of all Paul’s, he never hesitated, he wanted an adventure and couldn’t be bothered to wait until he could walk. I’d advise all those under 40 to do the same, and even some of you who are older could give it a try too. It’s not too late, not unless you are dead.

Anyway, Happy New Year. Let’s hope so for all our sakes.

P.S I must be going senile already, I seem to have written this a full 24 hours before the event. Call it a reprieve if you will, quick someone drag me to the nearest den of inequity whilst I still have a drop of youth in my being…

This post is tagged 40, artist, birthday, career, death, design, god, Hollywood, life, linear, logic, memory, movies, philosophy, quantum, script, time