Milestones: Is it more than a number?

I spend time exploring my life, mortality, and what is left to look forward to. What is the point?

I will have this sent out at 12:01AM PDT on Saturday May 10, 2025.

That is the moment where I complete my sixtieth trip ‘round our star, Sol.

Feels like this should be a big deal, but in reality, it is just a number, and it is just a day. Still it is a big deal.

Where I work, we get a day off for our birthday. It is a small gesture, but it is appreciated. Thus, I took yesterday, Friday May 9th off. Alas, I got to visit my dermatologist for the annual skin check. She had to remove a growth at the corner of my right eye to be sent for a biopsy. That is a good start to a birthday weekend, am I right?

The Past

Anyhow, on a day like this, I feel like I should reminisce about my past and the future. Sixty years is a long time on this earth, and judging by the fact that nobody in my mother’s generation of her side of the family made it past 62 years old, I am battling some genetic risk¹ that you can’t run from. Especially since I had a heart attack at the ripe old age of 44.

I was born on the leading edge of generation X, and after my parent’s divorced in 1971, it was an interesting time. Dubbed the “latch-key kid” era, my parents weren’t Boomers, they were the silent generation. Too young to fight in the WWII theaters, but on the older edge of the summer of love phenomenon. That led my parents to be odd. Vietnam, the space race, and the cold war were dominant themes in my early years.

In a sense, growing up in this time was pretty awesome. After the divorce, my mother worked as a typist, as a secretary at a local seminary, and she did cosmetology work. That meant that me and my siblings were free-range. It was pre-video games, and we didn’t have enough money for all the toys and activities.

In fact, as the changes in divorce laws made it easier for couples to split, it didn’t really help us kids out. My parents sniped at each other endlessly, and we were pawns in their drama. I can assure you: it sucked.

One example: in second grade, I wanted to learn to lay the clarinet. My father rented it, but then deducted the monthly fee from the child support. That led to a huge fight, and my dreams of playing a woodwind instrument were dashed.

Yeah, I am still bitter about that. I kept the lesson books until I was in my mid 30’s.

My mother played the field. Her second marriage was to an abusive alcoholic. The beatings he meted out were fucking awful. The rage would build, the belt would come off, and, let’s just say that the welts affected more than my hindquarters.

He had sporadic work, and I remember being drafted to help at the garage that he worked at (Ron Haifa’s 76 station on Almaden road at Coleman road. At the tender age of 7, I was pumping gas, stripping parts from cars, and cleaning greasy parts. For $5 a day.

From there, I got a paper route. I delivered the San Jose Mercury News, and later the San Francisco Chronicle. To this day, I get two or three nightmares a year where I am out on the route, but I can’t remember who were subscribers.

Nothing like waking up everyday at 4 AM to deliver all my papers by the 6:30 deadline².

After that, I got really into motorcycles. After Stepfather #1 passed away, my mother remarried an appliance repairman, and he introduced us to off-road motorcycling.

Hint: If you have kids, introduce them to motorcycles early, and they will never be able to afford drugs or girls.

I was spending so much of my paper route money on parts to keep my motorcycle running, I was offered a job at the local motorcycle parts shop.

This was a place that was a tax write-off for a local business man. But I got paid minimum wage and I got a deep discount on all the parts I was breaking every weekend. Win-win.

This gets me to about 1980.

After that, I got a job at Chuck E. Cheese. Actually, it was the first one, number 1, at the Town and Country shopping center (it is where the Santana Row is today). It was here where I discovered video games. Hoo boy, was it fun to work at one of the biggest arcades around. I counted tokens, cleaned machines, and made pizzas. I also was the rat.

This got me most of the way though high school.

From Chuck E. Cheese, I got fired. Not for anything I did, but I was working more hours than was allowed by the child labor laws, and because a manager called the California labor board, the big manager just cut me loose.

My next employment hop was the start of my serious cooking career. Marie Callendars, Sneakers (a sports bar), Ernesto’s (Mexican and seafood), Palo Alto Hills Golf and Country Club, Florentines, and finally the chef at a catering company (The Gourmet Galley).

During this time, I completed my studies at SJSU, matriculating with a B. Sc. Physics. My first non-restaurant job after college was as a chemical technician at a wafer fab. That ultimately led me to semiconductor equipment, and product management, a profession I have been doing for the last 27 years³.

Today, I begin my 61st trip around the sun, and as I look back, I have been working pretty much non-stop for 53 years.

No fucking wonder I am so damn tired.

I also think back 9 years ago, in 2016, I was terminated for cause (long story, might share it one day) and spent 6 months unemployed. It was fucking terrifying, but also it was liberating. Sure, that was a tough year money wise, but I got in great shape.

The Future

As I enter my seventh decade on this planet, I ponder what the future holds. If I can escape the early demise that wiped out my mother’s generation I have probably twenty more to go.

If I am lucky, I have one quarter of my years left.

While I have salted away plenty of money for retirement, I worry that I will not have enough (or more importantly, leave enough for my wife to survive). I keep stashing money there, and doing all the make-up accelerations.

Frankly, the amount of money I am making now is nuts. But I also know that this is likely the last stop on my tech employment journey.

Should I lose my job, I will not be able to come close to making this much again, so I have to maximize my savings rate⁴. But, my pile of savings, my wife’s meagre social security, the pension from one of my stops, the equity from my house here in Silicon Valley will let us move to a lower cost state, and if I can get a job at a Lowes or Home Depot to earn enough for health insurance, we will be fine. Maybe not perfectly comfortable, but it is doable.

But, if I can stay where I am at for 5 more years, and if I can retire at 65, life will be a lot more comfortable.

What is the point?

I am not sure why I dumped out my purse like this. Perhaps it is marking 6 decades on this astral plane, or perhaps it is because I have a day to kill, where I didn’t sleep well⁵.

Regardless, I felt it was time to just write.

This is a narrow slice of my life. I could talk about my phase of drinking too much in my early 20’s (working in restaurants means you end he night about midnight, and you have enough cash to lose yourself in an alcoholic haze - a least I avoided the nose candy).

Today, my birthday, is the first day of the rest of my life. Time to taxi for takeoff.

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1. The things I inherited from my mother are freckles, a tendency to have ingrown toenails, and coronary artery disease. Also, her generation smoked heavily, and didn't eat very healthy.

2. This is part of the reason why I am an unapologetic morning person.

3. That is a looooooong time

4. I am not worried, I know that I have been placed on the retain at all costs list

5. In the background, I have Everything, Everywhere, All at Once running. Man, Michelle Yeoh is awesome, and I love Stephanie Hsu. Great movie