What a Drag It Is Getting Old

I recently "celebrated" yet another birthday. I've had lots of them.

There comes a time in everyone's life, I suppose, when one has to face up to the fact that they are no longer "cool", if indeed they ever were. These days I feel that I'm about as cool as Al Gore. I strongly suspect that the fact that I can't come up with a more descriptive word than "cool" says a lot.

Back in the very early '70s (a particularly ugly decade), I dressed as my peers dressed, talked as my peers talked, and did much that my peers did. When I've seen pictures or had discussions about my life in those days, I wonder how I or anyone could have ever thought it was anything other than ghastly. Imagine purple shirts with puffed sleeves, vinyl vests, boots with 3-inch heels over calf-height that zipped up the sides. Add these things to braces on the teeth, eyeglasses, a teen-ager's moustache, and a Michael Nesmith hairstyle, and you get some image.

Pity me.

And yet, somehow, it was still cool.

In addition to the painful reminiscing, I keep finding myself exposed to more and more fresh reminders of my advancing age and looming mummyhood. I recently read (and replied to) a comment on a blog from someone who was lamenting the fact that they were "getting old" because they were celebrating their last birthday that started with a "2". I'm assuming here that they aren't 299. As if that wasn't bad enough, one of this person's readers commented that they witnessed a birthday party and caught themselves thinking about how nice it was for the young people, "like a 50-year old".

Argh. Yeah, we 50-year olds sit around in our rockers with our shawls over our laps and toothlessly smile down at the young 'uns while waiting for our meds to be delivered.

A lonely man cries for love and has none.
Senior citizens wish they were young.
-Moody Blues

For the first time in my life, there exists the possibility that the next President of The United States will be younger than me.

Yeesh.

If I was ever cool, I'm not now. Aside from the oft-cited aches and creaks in my body, here's how I know:

1) I am in possession of not one, but two VCRs, one of which is so old that it will not accept a date past 2007. It still works. This is a form of planned obsolescence that wouldn't have occurred to me.

2) When I last bought a cell phone, I told the 8-year old sales clerk that I wasn't interested in a camera, watching movies or television, fancy ring tones, built-in satellite dishes, flashing lights, tasers, or hurricane tracking radar. I just wanted a phone. After explaining that a few more times, I was shown several models that didn't have very good cameras, or only allowed limited TV reception, or fired only the weakest of laser beams, but I stuck to my guns. There was exactly one to choose from. I suspect that I won't even have that option when the time comes to replace it. The sales clerk still talks about to me to his little friends over graham crackers and cocoa during nappy time, I'm sure.

3) I own a large drawer full of cassette tapes loaded with some pretty cool classic rock music. The only method I have of playing those tapes is a boom-box that stays in a closet in the guest bedroom.

4) I own a boom-box.

5) My hair would have been considered "cool" in 1969, except that now it's got so much gray in it that it couldn't have been cool even then. So the lack of coolness of my hair now spans generations.

6) I have a full-time job.

7) I own a house in the suburbs (that is, the bank owns about 75% of a house in the suburbs and my wife and I each own 12.5%).

8) I drive an Oldsmobile.

9) I don't understand much of today's music, and as such sometimes catch myself making crotchety old-guy statements about it.

10) A disturbingly high percentage of my sentences these days start with some variation of "I remember when..." followed by some statement about how much something used to cost, how difficult it used to be to perform some task, or how I was able to do something with relative ease (and, *ahem*, frequency). Why I feel compelled to impart this information is completely beyond me, and so far people have been very tolerant, often patting me on the head and trying to appear interested while looking at their watches before telling me that visiting hours are nearly over.

He's a well-respected man about town,
doing the best things so conservatively.
-The Kinks

There are some old guys that I think managed to stay cool despite their advanced years. Jerry Garcia, George Carlin, Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg. What do these cool old guys have in common? That's right. All dead. But they died cool. I don't see that happening for me.

Then there are the guys that I thought would be cool forever. Have you seen Eric Clapton or David Bowie lately?

These guys could be investment bankers, right? Are they still cool? Hard to say.

Still and overall, despite my advancing years and dwindling coolness, I'm basically a happy guy. I'm happily married to a fabulous woman, I'm fairly comfortable, I'm healthy, I eat well, I get to travel, all things that a lot of guys only wish for. I guess I don't actually have to be cool for the rest of my life, especially if it means dying early.

So just stay off my lawn. And if that Frisbee comes in here one more time, I'm keeping it.