Once a Slacker, always a Slacker
Aging has been on my mind a lot lately, since I turned 39. It’s a crazy age to be, really. I think I sort of thought that I’d never be this age. Not that I thought I’d die or something, just that I imagined myself being, somehow, a completely different person by this point. I never thought that I’d feel like the same exact person who walked down the street at age 16 with my best friend (who is still my best friend!) and heard some middle-aged guy sigh and go, “Oh, to be 18 again...” That girl is still me, and I’m still her.
That was 23 years ago, which does and does not seem like a long fucking time ago. When I was that age, 23 years ago was 1966. And yes, that did seem like another age, another world. My parents hadn’t even met, yet. The Beatles were still touring. Woodstock hadn’t happened. Things were different.
The teenagers I see now don’t seem so different from me and my friends. We still did the same stupid things, acted the same stupid ways, thought we were smarter and better than anyone else. We were sarcastic, superior and sullen. Of course... the internet didn’t really exist. No one had a cell phone. If you wanted to listen to music, you had to buy it. In a store. Instead of marriage equality, we were talking about finding a cure for AIDS. So, yeah, things were different. But they didn’t feel different, at least not to me. I’m pretty sure that a teenager from now could be transported back to 1989 and fit in just fine, with a little bit of technological adjustment. We were assholes too, just like the current crop. I have a feeling that my parents’ could have said the same thing about 1966.
So. Now I am on the cusp of middle age. I have a hard time reconciling that with the person I think I am, but there it is. You can’t argue with the calendar.
I recently went to see a performance by The Baseball Project. They are a kind of super (or sort of-super) group of famous and semi-famous middle aged rockers who write and play songs about the beautiful sport of baseball. Does that sound intensely sad and boring to you? Because, I can understand that. But to me, it sounds beautiful. I love it. Steve Wynn, Mike Mills, Peter Buck and Scott McCaughey, singing about fucking baseball. Guh. It gets me. But that’s me. I happen to love these men, and I love baseball, and I love that they love it. I find it impossibly adorable that they would give the game such unabashed love.
This show was at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, NJ. It’s a tiny venue, with a ton of history, and I couldn’t help but feel like these guys were basking in some kind of beloved rock and roll past by playing there. Peter Buck was standing two feet from me in the audience during the opening act, and passed close enough to me that I could have touched him on his way to the bar. I could have said hi, but what where could I have gone from there? “Dude. I love R.E.M.?” Yeah, okay. Me and a million other Gen Xers.
But anyway, my moment of truth didn’t really have much to do with the guys on stage. Sure, it was a little weird to see grey and grizzled Buck and Mills up there, in stark contrast to the sweet, cute boys on the R.E.M. poster I had on my wall in high school, back when Stipe was still sporting those angelic curls. But they’d been around for a long time, it’s not like they’d gone away and I was shocked by their aged appearance. No, the shock for me was in the audience. I was standing in a sea of Chuck Taylors, rock t-shirts, and grey hair under baseball caps. These old guys were all of an age I clearly remember my own father being.
And yet, I knew these men. Over there, I could see the guy in the Big Star t-shirt, who talked earnestly to me about Pet Sounds for half an hour before I made out with him. Down the wall from him, the annoying little asshole who wouldn’t shut the fuck up about Primus. Across the room, the guy who sold me tabs of acid with Ren and Stimpy on them, having lost his pretty blond hair, but still retaining his haunted fishbowl-blue eyes. These were my boys, and I suddenly loved them more than ever.
They were old, and they were paunchy, but that’s not really what I saw. I saw the boys I had loved, way back when. I looked at them, and I wanted to give them all a big hug and tell them, “It’s okay. I know. I don’t judge you for not wanting to grow up, and I don’t judge you for having done just that, anyway. I know who you are.”
I have long since been aware of the annoying and somewhat sad tendency of my generation to compulsively reference the pop culture of our youth. So, I scrupulously avoid making references to Evel Kneivel or Kevin Arnold, and I hardly ever call anyone “Pony Boy.” But I have to admit, when Mike Mills took the mike and sang “Rockville,” I was shouting out the chorus just as loud as anyone else there, and I felt a sense of belonging that I had, for so long, resisted. That melancholy lyric, so full of longing and regret, summed it up for me as well as anything ever has. I don’t want to waste another year, ever, because they get more scarce by the day. And you shouldn’t either, no matter how old or young you are.
That was 23 years ago, which does and does not seem like a long fucking time ago. When I was that age, 23 years ago was 1966. And yes, that did seem like another age, another world. My parents hadn’t even met, yet. The Beatles were still touring. Woodstock hadn’t happened. Things were different.
The teenagers I see now don’t seem so different from me and my friends. We still did the same stupid things, acted the same stupid ways, thought we were smarter and better than anyone else. We were sarcastic, superior and sullen. Of course... the internet didn’t really exist. No one had a cell phone. If you wanted to listen to music, you had to buy it. In a store. Instead of marriage equality, we were talking about finding a cure for AIDS. So, yeah, things were different. But they didn’t feel different, at least not to me. I’m pretty sure that a teenager from now could be transported back to 1989 and fit in just fine, with a little bit of technological adjustment. We were assholes too, just like the current crop. I have a feeling that my parents’ could have said the same thing about 1966.
So. Now I am on the cusp of middle age. I have a hard time reconciling that with the person I think I am, but there it is. You can’t argue with the calendar.
I recently went to see a performance by The Baseball Project. They are a kind of super (or sort of-super) group of famous and semi-famous middle aged rockers who write and play songs about the beautiful sport of baseball. Does that sound intensely sad and boring to you? Because, I can understand that. But to me, it sounds beautiful. I love it. Steve Wynn, Mike Mills, Peter Buck and Scott McCaughey, singing about fucking baseball. Guh. It gets me. But that’s me. I happen to love these men, and I love baseball, and I love that they love it. I find it impossibly adorable that they would give the game such unabashed love.
This show was at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, NJ. It’s a tiny venue, with a ton of history, and I couldn’t help but feel like these guys were basking in some kind of beloved rock and roll past by playing there. Peter Buck was standing two feet from me in the audience during the opening act, and passed close enough to me that I could have touched him on his way to the bar. I could have said hi, but what where could I have gone from there? “Dude. I love R.E.M.?” Yeah, okay. Me and a million other Gen Xers.
But anyway, my moment of truth didn’t really have much to do with the guys on stage. Sure, it was a little weird to see grey and grizzled Buck and Mills up there, in stark contrast to the sweet, cute boys on the R.E.M. poster I had on my wall in high school, back when Stipe was still sporting those angelic curls. But they’d been around for a long time, it’s not like they’d gone away and I was shocked by their aged appearance. No, the shock for me was in the audience. I was standing in a sea of Chuck Taylors, rock t-shirts, and grey hair under baseball caps. These old guys were all of an age I clearly remember my own father being.
And yet, I knew these men. Over there, I could see the guy in the Big Star t-shirt, who talked earnestly to me about Pet Sounds for half an hour before I made out with him. Down the wall from him, the annoying little asshole who wouldn’t shut the fuck up about Primus. Across the room, the guy who sold me tabs of acid with Ren and Stimpy on them, having lost his pretty blond hair, but still retaining his haunted fishbowl-blue eyes. These were my boys, and I suddenly loved them more than ever.
They were old, and they were paunchy, but that’s not really what I saw. I saw the boys I had loved, way back when. I looked at them, and I wanted to give them all a big hug and tell them, “It’s okay. I know. I don’t judge you for not wanting to grow up, and I don’t judge you for having done just that, anyway. I know who you are.”
I have long since been aware of the annoying and somewhat sad tendency of my generation to compulsively reference the pop culture of our youth. So, I scrupulously avoid making references to Evel Kneivel or Kevin Arnold, and I hardly ever call anyone “Pony Boy.” But I have to admit, when Mike Mills took the mike and sang “Rockville,” I was shouting out the chorus just as loud as anyone else there, and I felt a sense of belonging that I had, for so long, resisted. That melancholy lyric, so full of longing and regret, summed it up for me as well as anything ever has. I don’t want to waste another year, ever, because they get more scarce by the day. And you shouldn’t either, no matter how old or young you are.