This summer I turn 54 years old. It's still a bit surreal, being over fifty, realizing I'm over fifty....and I suppose by the time I get used to it, I'll be sixty, and have to start the whole wretched process of coping all over again. But a sense of mortality has its distinct advantages, and one of them is a sense of urgency.

A couple of years ago I realized that the methods I had invented, learned or stolen from others to navigate life and to steward my own existence here on this planet and this plane were no longer yielding appreciable results. Whether it was controlling my weight, increasing my muscle mass, upping my writing game, organizing my thoughts, improving my love life, or anything else you care to name, I had become a poster boy for the law of diminishing returns. Remember Don Lapre? In the 90s, you couldn't avoid this son of a bitch on late-night infomercials. He was always there hawking vitamins or credit repair or your own 900 number phone line business. Dude made millions and was dubbed King of Infomercials. Then the internet came along and he faded from relevance as did the infomercial itself. He also died in prison...but that's another story. My point here is that people who don't adapt die, figuratively or literally. They fade away. And I didn't want to fade. In fact, I wanted to burn brighter than before.

My eventual answer to the dilemma, and the desire, was to cobble together something I half-humorously, half-pompously refer to as Project 54. Project 54 is a series of goals I have set for myself to reach, or have well in motion, by my 54th birthday. But it is more than a wish-list or a series of resolutions. It is an attempt to apply new methodology to the goals I have laid out, in the hopes that a different approach, a different angle, will yield increasing returns.

The first and perhaps most important goal of P54 is to better my health. This includes losing 10% of my body weight (I've already lost about 3%) and keeping it off. But it also includes a radically different exercise routine which includes changing my gym, and may incorporate a personal trainer and a resumption of martial arts training. I have already purchased a sauna blanket and am feeling its delightful endorphin-releasing effects. New methods, better results. The point is not to look younger, but to feel healthier and to be stronger and more sculpted and powerful. Forget maintaining, I want to conquer.

The second goal, only a whit behind the first, is to have one EXPERIENCE every month of the year. An EXPERIENCE is something which goes so far outside my ordinary routine as to be memorable forever-after. January was a wash because I was broke after Christmas and also had a persistent sinus infection I picked up in L.A., but in February I attended a Nine Inch Nails concert with my oldest friend: that's an EXPERIENCE. In March I am attending a Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship match at Mohegan Sun in Connecticut with a fraternity brother. I'm also hitting up something called the Edgar Allen Poe Speakeasy, a pop-up bar expeirence in which actors read some of Poe's work in an appropriately moody-looking setup and the audience drinks cocktails. (I had an Alaska trip planned with a special someone, but it has to be rescheduled due to work reasons). Anyway, you see how that goes: every month, one extraordinary thing. Sometimes more, if circumstances permit, but never less.

Three is to elevate my writing life by collaborating with another author, getting another agent (my old one deserted me), or getting one of my unpublished novels traditionally published. Failing that, to find a better method of marketing my independently published works, as my existing methods have gone as far as they can possibly go.

Four is to expand my YouTube channel, Stone Cold Prose (the old name of this blog!) to include interviews with authors, actors, stuntmen, ex-cops, ex-gangsters, and anyone else I think would make a great interview. Also to use it as a marketing tool to sell my books.

And this takes me to Five, which is, at the behest of another old friend. He is on fire with enthusiasm to use AI, artistically, to help me expand my creative endeavors. In practical terms this means creating photorealistic "live action" trailers of my various books. In impractical (for now) terms, it means turning a script I have written into an AI-generated movie. In short, he aims for nothing short of the creation of an independent studio which farms my considerable catelogue of ideas for its content.

There is more, including upping my financial literacy (learning how to trade silver futures, for example, instead of just playing the stock market), more travel (included in EXPERIENCE but also its own thing), and a few other, more personal goals I shan't mention. My point here is that PROJECT 54 has already changed to some degree the way I am conducting my personal business. Ditching my old gym, making hasty plans to visit Alaska, and rocking out to NIN are wonderful symptoms of a disease I have given myself: a fever for substantive change.

For those interested, or those who may wish to emulate me in their own way, my intention is to revisit this topic on my birthday and apprise you of my progress. It goes without saying, though I will say it anyway, that anything I have failed to accomplish, or only partially accomplished, will be continued into the following year via PROJECT 55; less obvious is that I will have new goals for that yearlong period. I believe that we must challenge ourselves constantly, particularly as we get older and our routines become ruts. This is not only the best way to stay alive; it's the best way to keep us living.