There is an article in the current issue of The Seattle Weekly entitled "Big Nanny Is Watching You." It is about how the city of Seattle is turning into Nannytown, trying to regulate our behavior and restrict our freedoms in the name of making this a more liveable city. They focus on a few recent legal maneuvers:

• New restrictions on strip clubs in the city. Dancers can't come within four feet of patrons; no drinking is allowed; tips go in a tip jar; bright lighting is required.
• A ban on sales of the kind of liquor that is frequently purchased by the homeless: any beer with alcohol content over 5.7% costing less than 4 cents per ounce.
• The statewide smoking ban, approved last November by voters by an almost 2 to 1 margin. It outlaws smoking in all workplaces and within 25 feet of the entrance or of ventilation ducts of any publicly accessible building.
• An aggressive anti-smoking campaign at http://www.ashtraymouth.com, and its accompanying TV commercials.

I have mixed feelings about all of this. I'm one of the most strongly anti-smoking people around, and have been for eons. (When I was a kid, my dad used to send me down to the corner store to buy him cigarettes -- this back in the day when I might or might not have to say something like "They're for my father" in order to get them to sell me a pack -- and at one point I attempted a moratorium on supporting him in his vile habit. I got in a lot of trouble for refusing to buy cigarettes for him. I think he believed it was more about not wanting to be bothered to run the errand than about taking a moral stance, and he may have been partly right, but he was also capable of being a bully, and it was hard to stand up to him in general. He eventually quit smoking in his mid 50s, when he had a quadruple bypass that only extended his life by about ten years.) Although I did vote yes on the anti-smoking initiative last fall, even I had reservations, because I did identify with the big-brotherness of it all.

What convinces me, though, that smoking is a different behavior from going to strip clubs or drinking beer in the streets is that second-hand smoke cannot be avoided. I don't have to go to strip clubs if I choose not to. I don't have to interact with homeless people if they give me the willies. Granted, this might mean going out of my way to avoid certain neighborhoods, but avoiding neighborhoods where homeless people hang out is not really going very much out of my way.

I think that when a smoker makes me inhale his or her exhaled cigarette smoke, I ought to have the right to take chewing gum out of my mouth and force them to chew it. I feel like picking my nose and flicking my boogers at them. So I have no compunction about inconveniencing them or marginalizing them. In fact, I'd be comfortable with a law outlawing all outdoor smoking. I can't walk around downtown Seattle without getting a whiff. Whose rights does smoking infringe upon?

As for the larger issue, is Seattle becoming Nannytown? Yeah, it kind of seems that way. But not because of the smoking ban.

Yesterday was my 599 Monthiversary. I'm now in my 600th month of life. And ending the 50th year of my life. I'm kind of obsessive about this.

Part of my obsession, I suppose, is about still being single at 50. I didn't anticipate that when I was, oh, 49. Actually, on my 49th birthday, I was dating someone I liked a lot. It didn't last.

Part of my obsession, also, is about being gay and not young. Young in gay culture is about being in your early 20s. Guys in their 30s are past their prime in this warped corner of society; guys in their 40s are definitely over the hill. Guys in their 50s are trolls.

I realize, as I near 50, that it would be very difficult for me to modify my lifestyle to accommodate a partner. I'd love to be seeing someone and for it to be serious; but it's hard to imagine taking it to the next step, living together. I suppose if it happened, things would work themselves out. But there's a lot more room in my heart than there is in my "house."

"House" in quotes might be the house I own, but even if it's a different house, when you're 50, you move in with your own way of establishing a household. Building that in partnership with someone else would always involve negotiation and compromise and capitulation, but that's got to be much easier to pull off when you're younger and haven't been on your own for so long.

The fact that it's a non-issue right now is somewhat comforting.

Meanwhile, I'm pleased that I'm now officially employed by POP, the company where I've been contracting for the last 2 1/2 months. I have a good feeling about the future working there, and it's nice to be on solid ground financially. I don't know how short-term contractors do it. I've talked to many who love that life for the same reason I didn't love it: they like to be able to separate themselves from the world of the company where they work. I want to be involved and invested in the work and the life of the company. Yes, there's always office politics, and I could do without some of that, but I have an advantage over a lot of people in the business world: I used to work in academia, and I think there's no workplace in the world where the politics is more damaging and depressing. Comparatively, the office politics have always been easy for me to deal with in the business world.

I do think they managed to get me in as a full-time employee just in time to enable me to work lots of overtime in the next couple of weeks if necessary to complete my project. Smart of them, huh? I don't mind at all, though. It's been hard for me to go home after 8 hours of work and not be able to finish what I was doing.

Over the last month or so, I've been through periods of major frustration at work, struggling to make things work right. When I'm in the midst of that, it's not fun, but when I'm past it, it's so rewarding. I look back at what I worked on yesterday, for instance. It was what should've been a simple modification on a web page, and it took like four hours to make it work. I wanted to throw my computer across the room at one point. But when it finally worked, I wanted to cheer out loud.

It's all good.

It's 2006.

It's the year I turn 50.

I remember, when I was a kid, figuring out how old I'd be in the year 2000. The year 2000 was a year that would never come, except in some futuristic science-fiction Jetson's world. And I'd be 44, which was unthinkably old. Even older than Mom and Dad!

Sometimes I think, I'm the age my dad was when I was ___. So now I'm almost 50; when my dad was 50, I was 21. I'm the age my dad was when I graduated from college. My mom threw an elaborate surprise party, and I came down from Syracuse. My sister Troy was living in Florida at the time, and she flew up as a surprise. My sister Brooke and I (did I pick her up in Albany? I can't remember) hid out at the neighbors' house while we waited for Mom and Dad to leave so we could go set up for the party.

Now I'm starting to think, I'm the age my dad was when he ___. I'm almost the age my dad was when he had his bypass surgery. Hell, I'm almost the age my dad was when he died.

It feels kind of morbid to think like this, but it really makes me feel young. How foolish I was, in the 1960s, to think how old I'd be in 2000! I'm still not old.