I Am Almost Old

The best thing about life is that you can always find someone worse off than you to make you feel better about yourself. –Rich Sparhawk

I feel the end coming on. It’s looming. I am about to get old. One kid with another on the way. Buying a second house for the first time. It’s there, right over the edge of the sink, in the mirror where the grey hairs have started to nest.

You can look at your parents and grandparents and see that they are old. They are old because they have given up. You get so much piled on top and you just give in to old age. It’s inevitable. You look at yourself and you can see it roosting. You’d like to avoid it, but you just can’t. Usually you can fight it off by being too busy to notice, but you can’t avoid it forever. Now, there are a very slim few who can fight it off for a little bit. (Robert Redford did for a bit. So did Britney Spears.) Everyone else who tries to stay young just looks creepy. You can date young and you can wear young clothes and dance at the young clubs, but you still hurt in the morning and can’t crap when you want.

I’m still young though. I sneak by through hanging out with younger people. It about time I dump my current friends and pick up new younger ones. They were great five years ago when they were 25, but now they are all getting married with kids… old. I need a new batch of green punks that still have good parties and don’t mind being four hours late to work. I need new irresponsibility.

But that’s not going to happen, because the one thing that takes and knocks your old ass over the old edge is going to pop out any day now.

This thing I keep rambling on about is the “I don’t get it.” As soon as you say or even think it, you are old. It’s either fashion or dance or technology that dumbfounds a forty something right into Depends. So far I have been able to accept baggy pants and bluegrass-acid jazz and tattoos behind the ear and 16 year olds with pacifiers and IM and blogs and lip piercing and Ugg boots and tipped – no- slanted – no- backwards – no – oh shit they’ve gone full circle and now it’s hats on straight. I’ve made it though. But I am waiting for the one trend that makes me shake my head and pull my belt up to my tits.

So screw that. I’m inventing that trend. I am going to be behind the movement that pushes most 30-somethings into old age. The synchronic screams of passing youth will fill the air as the stock in Rascals triples.

The trend is: Knock Yourself Out Dancing. It goes like this: Try to punch yourself into unconsciousness while dancing. Its beauty is its simplicity. It will start quite simply: A random teen punk will be searching the internet for “beer bong” and “Elvis riding a unicorn” and stumble across my blog. As he reads every tenth word, he’ll accidentally read “Ugg boots” and slow down enough to catch the phrase Knock Yourself Out Dancing. Later that weekend at the 16+ dance at the Reef Graveyard, he’ll begin the trend. By the end of the night, the floor will be covered in Red Bull and bruised wannabes. So it begins…

He’ll take the credit, but you will all know the truth behind your own giving in. I’ll sit and smile as web sites bulge at the seams with comments on how that Knock Yourself Out Dancing (or NyO as it will be called) is the dumbest thing in the world and that they just don’t get it. Kids these days.

Ohio has something called the Golden Buckeye Card for seniors. I hope your state has the same.