Another One Bites The Dust

The Grinch's 42nd birthday winked by over the weekend, conveniently and perpetually stapled onto the St. Patrick’s Day excesses so no one can claim I’m grandstanding when I call up asking about their plans for the 17th.
Managed to lasso several people into meeting for commemorative post-magrib Irish Coffees at the Waterfall Bar in the Hyatt in central Jakarta. Commemorative in as much as St. Pats will always be the object of deliberate situational irony: I converted to Islam on the same date in 2004 – it is illegal to perform inter-religious weddings in Indonesia – and made a bee-line from the mosque to the Hyatt (2005 photo above) to mark the holiday. As I’ve been bottled up in Aceh the past two years it seemed appropriate to mark the first post-tsunami Jakarta anniversary of – as one close family member described it “my apostasy” – in similarly irreverent fashion.
Later we retired to the salubrious confines of a dime-a-dozen “Irish” pub in a second Western hotel for multiple refreshing Guinni and fish n chips, where I won a draw for a Rupiah 150,000 (Can $20) voucher to yet another hotel bar – famed for the youth and relative health of its female patrons (known locally as ‘ayam’ or ‘chicken’) – which is sufficient funds to get a fine glow-on.
I had one of “those” conversations about aging with some hanger-on though predictably the perspectives are quite different on account of this Grinch’s legendary constitution, anticipated late punch-out date and numerous inebriated promises not to die before people several decades his junior.
I believe we broke much new ground, concluding among other things that:
1. Youth is wasted on the young.
2. The worst performance of Led Zeppelin’s career still totally kicks the ass of any rock band currently in existence.
3. The female of the species only truly starts to bloom at 40. (Editors Note: Article 4 revised up from 35, 30, 25, 20 and 18 over past two and a half decades. See Grinch Archives).
4. Drivers licenses should only be issued to people over 30 (with exceptions made for under-30s driving agricultural vehicles providing they are restricted to tertiary roads and farms.)
5. Anyone between the ages of 18 and 40 with a barbed wire tattoo who has not served time in a federal penitentiary should be immediately incarcerated.
6. Brittany Spears and her ilk are a bad influence.
7. Life becomes more valuable as you get older because young people are stupid.
8. Its hard to understand why yoots don’t ask their parents for advice about things like sex, alcohol and peer-pressure. I mean, it wasn’t that long ago that they were in the same position, right?
9. Is it just me or is the music in here too loud?
10. Larry King’s interviews with Red Buttons and Angie Dickenson really crackle.