How old do you feel?
alieNDN
2,181 Posts
So the other day my friend came back from a trip in New York. I told him I have this wicked documentary on the early hip hop/grafitti movement (Style Wars) where he visited, so I'd bring the DVD to his place and we'd watch. I think I bought this DVD just about less than 8 years ago. I only watched it once prior, around when I first purchased it.
So we're watching it, and I'm loving the tunes and all. But parts of it make me uncomfortable watching it this time around. My friend goes "these guys are pricks". And the wierd thing is that I'm agreeing with him! Man I love cartoonism, and all the styles and art that comes with it, but when I started to think about public sites being tagged, I got all conservative on my liberal youth's face. Y'all ever encounter a similar sentiment? One of those, "I'm turning into my parents" things!
So we're watching it, and I'm loving the tunes and all. But parts of it make me uncomfortable watching it this time around. My friend goes "these guys are pricks". And the wierd thing is that I'm agreeing with him! Man I love cartoonism, and all the styles and art that comes with it, but when I started to think about public sites being tagged, I got all conservative on my liberal youth's face. Y'all ever encounter a similar sentiment? One of those, "I'm turning into my parents" things!
Comments
Chan!
And I've noticed a few white hairs, but have learned to accept them. No hair dye anytime soon.
I think the key to life is to enjoy everything you do and to do everything you enjoy. Music keeps me feeling young and finding new music gives me something to look forward to every day. I still party the same way I did 20-30 years ago and probably dress the same way too.
The thing that has changed the most in my life since I was an idealistic teen hitch-hiking around the country is the amount of responsibility, accountability and respect for life in general that I now have. Today I would NEVER pick up a hitchhiker and wonder about the sanity of those who picked me up.
Raising children, staying married, owning property and running a business makes you realize the difference between ideals and reality. Doing the "right thing" is key as I can't think of anything more miserable than being old AND having regrets. Being 17 and defacing property is "normal".....being 40 and not realizing that it's wrong is just sad.
Along with age comes experience, knowledge and wisdom. Those things can make you appear "old" to younger folks or immature peers. Don't ever forget what you were like when you were younger and always move forward. Time will pass quickly and age won't ever be a concern.
Unfortunately for many it also brings stress, worries, regrets and facing mortality which can lead to unnecessary health issues. IMO if you make it to 75 you've won and everything else is gravy. My great-grandmother worked in her garden the day before she died at 105 years old.....I don't think she ever felt "old".
Most folks are either rebelling against their parents or becoming them. The reason "You're only as old as you feel" is an old saying is because it's true.
Bowl of Pozole took care of that before noon....I definitely feel younger than Tony Romo today!
Haha! Sayin'! I bet Big Ben feels even worse. I made some honey mustard chicken wangs that are wiping away the physical memory of years gone by as we speak. With a Rolling Rock back. I will live to fight another day. :beerbang:
and when i play certain songs and kids look at me like wtf.
The other day, I made a Dukes of Hazzard reference, and it totally went over this young breezy's head.
I hope for your sake it wasnt the rosco p coltrane laugh
I know it's done to death, but "_____ is the new _____" rings true. The expectations for women to be married and have kids by a certain age have definitely changed.
I have basically felt the same since I was 25 as far as what I want to my life to be about and how I approach things.
I have a lopsided smile so I have this bracket of a wrinkle on the left side of my face that has popped up recently. I am in love with it.
You old coot.
bathate real talk.
I feel old at work sometimes, because my youngest students nowadays were born in 93, and Ill have references to stuff that they dont get. And i think of all the crazy shit i was doing in 93 when they were still swimming in their womb pools
But then i feel young when hanging around other mid-30ish peoples, and they are all flabby and sick, larry holmes style, like they were cool but then turned into huge fuckin squares. I think Hiphop, Scratching, Diggin, Deejaying, and Graffiti, etc have kept me young in spirit cuz I dont get caught up in the rat race most the people my age got trapped in.
And to the OP, please sell that StyleWars DVD, you and your square friend dont deserve to watch that, with your crusty ass attitude towards the best art style ever created, lol.
I remember ripping that off of someone's iTunes in my dormitory's network years ago! It's not stealing if it was already stolen.
that was SOOOoooooo long ago, omg. I mean like Jay-Z was just starting out then.
Wow now i feel like so old when i recall playin it out after 9/11!
Omg, you do sound so old, like really old.
Old obviously means something entirely different to a 24 y/o than it does to a 40-something. Now excuse me while I check to see if I grew any more white hairs.
renewed my workout routine with a vengeance. Kicked
my metabolism in the rear and am feeling better than I
have felt in a good while. Biked 24 miles yesterday, did
a 30 minute workout today that touched everything, and
I'll cook up something tomorrow workout wise that may or
may not include some hills on the mountain bike but will
most definitely involve kettlebells. Drinking a lot more
water these days as well. Staying fit is a lifestyle and an
addiction. Once you see and feel the gains you keep
pushing, at least I do. From my early 20's through to my
mid 30's I worked out somewhat regular. I ran a ton more
then but have taken to the bike to spare my knees. From
my mid 30's to about a year ago I slowed down my work-
outs. I felt and looked more sluggish too as I started to
put on some weight in my middle that I previously never
had. Hence the renewed commitment and now I don't
see myself ever turning back. A TON more energy. To
answer your question, I feel and look much younger than
most dudes my age.
This is a great article on getting older written by one of
my favorite writers:
Liking It, As Is
Catching Shakespeare at the cusp
February11, 2008
Last spring, with the last few weeks of my thirties draining away, I drove back alone to San Francisco from a music conference in Seattle, where I had given a talk on The Tower Recordings and the paradoxes of experimental folk music. I crashed with some friends in Portland, and left early in the morning so that I could catch a Shakespeare play in Ashland that afternoon.
It was a pretty attractive drive, especially once I left I-5???s rank papermill purgatory and hit the lush southern folds of the state. I drove through the hills and dales in a kind of abstract glaze, however, as the looming brand of 40 had me grinding through the worry beads of my life with more morose vexation than usual. My accomplishments, it seemed to me that day, did not the mustard cut. Though the feeling was as predictable as clockwork, I was still struck with the sense???made even more poignant or at least absurd by the perpetual adolescence that I share with so many of my generation???that I had not lived life to its fullest as a young man, and was now no longer young.
Though I am by temperament more of a history and tragedy buff, the play I chanced to catch that afternoon was ???As You Like It.??? As I shuffled into the hall and took my seat, I recalled not much more about the play than a forest, the cross-dressing Rosalind, and a bunch of weddings at the end. I idly flipped through the program, and only gradually became aware of the peculiar fact that the surrounding audience was almost completely divided between old people and teenage school kids. I suppose that those are precisely the class of humans you would expect to see at the theater at 1pm on a weekday, but it still unnerved me. My peers were all elsewhere, gainfully employed, supporting families, taken by their creative muse.
I turned to look for compatriots in the rows behind me, and my glance fell on a girl in a white dress who sat behind me. She was about fifteen years old, and had accessorized the vestal look by placing a white flower???a peony I think, I don???t know my flowers???in her neatly coifed straw-blond hair. She was pretty, without a doubt, but in an abstract, flowery way, too young and wide-eyed to stir desire that was in itself not essentially abstract???a desire composed less of attraction than of my own wish to be young enough to actually warrant such a creature. Then a sickly sweet odor hit my nose, and I turned to its source: a blue haired biddie who sat two seats down from the nymphet, one of scores of old folks bussed in for the afternoon. I don???t know what it was???some sugary perfume or laundry detergent or peculiar brand of mothball???but I faintly gagged.
I turned to face the empty stage and the full force of Time hit me like a two-by-four. Here I was, halfway through life???s journey, poised on the dizzy summit of my life???s parabola, gazing at the far limits of the curve at either end. On the one hand, the taut white bud of an impossible youth and, on the other, the cloying decay that draws it and us inevitably into the earth, that will swallow up me and my beautiful wife and all the women and men I love. Then the hall darkened.
Woah Nellie! Good thing the show was a comedy???and a deeply entertaining one at that. As is often the case, the Ashland company decided to liven things up by setting the play far from the Renaissance, and had settled upon America during the Depression. The early flapper scenes in the court didn???t work so well, but things picked up considerably once Rosalind, Orlando, and crew flee to the forest of Arden. There we meet the good exiled Duke Senior, whose opening ???sweet are the uses of adversity??? speech reminded me on that rich and difficult day that suffering too is a kind of self-discovery, that the discomforts of life in the forest are ???counselors / That feelingly persuade me what I am.???
This flash of recognition was nothing compared to the subsequent appearance of Jacques, the Duke???s musing melancholic anti-fool. Jacques, as people who actually know their Shakespeare would have recalled right off the bat, is the mouthpiece for the famous ???all the world???s a stage??? monologue, a bitter little rant about the ages of man that, when it was delivered by the snooty grouch who embodied Jacques that day, sent massive, almost psychedelic shudders down my spine.
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms???
Not only did Jacques???s meditation echo my own sense of dire transition, but it triggered the forgotten fact that I had memorized and performed this very monologue when I was in elementary school, not too much younger than the kids sitting near me. That was back when I was at the second age, ???the whining schoolboy with his satchel,??? and now, hearing it again decades later, I was lost somewhere between the stage of soldier, ???seeking the bubble reputation???, and a half-assed older justice, ???full of wise saws and modern instances??????instances like these you are reading about, I suppose, that make an afternoon at the stage an allegory of loss and return.
The play itself is, I discovered, all about time. The world of court is the world of clock-time, of duty and exchange and production, while the free forest of Arden is a pastoral place of timelessness, or at least the different kind of time that comes to lovers and shepherds and other acolytes of the imagination. Orlando says to the disguised Rosalind, ???There???s no clock in the forest;??? Rosalind replies that ???Time travels in divers paces with divers persons.??? This kind of relativity reminds us of the plasticity of time, and especially those interior modes of time???mystic glimpse, ardent gaze, sexy dancing???that elude the objective clocks of the real world, the grinding time of measurement that the fool Touchstone captures when he says:
Tis but an hour ago since it was nine,
And after one hour more 'twill be eleven;
And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe,
And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot;
And thereby hangs a tale.
Jacques??? seven ages speech is itself such a hanging tale, and its fateful seriality is of a piece with that melancholy that he maintains despite living in the Arcadian forest, with its ardent echoes of Eden. In a sense, Jacques??? melancholy is of a piece with his anguished awareness of time as an assembly line, or a disassembly line, at the end of which all pleasure and love and dream spills into the pit of mere oblivion, ???Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.???Et in arcadia Ego.
My day already seemed proof of Jacques??? rhetorical momento mori, but as he finished his brief monologue I flashed on something subtler, or at least more personal: that my young choice to soliloquize such a jaded breakdown of life reflected an early intuition that, like Jacques, I too would spend a lot of my life with Saturn on my ass???a recognition I could even further see was a kind of choice, the way I sometimes pretended back then to have a limp because it seemed to lend a strange and elevated character to the tedious business of walking from here to there. It was not that I was damned to be Jacques???only that, on days like today, I continued to play him.
And I could see it that way because the play itself treats time as play, as love-play or Hindu leela, a forest frolic made sacred and good in its ritual repetition as a play, a whirligig of wish fulfillment, the eternal return of those escaped slaves who "lose and neglect the creeping hours of time." This is deep comedy: not the assembly line, but the dancing recurrence of hours of love or their echoing analogues, as if all ritual was a kind of comedy, an affirmation of desire???not just as you like it, but as you will, so mote it be???and all this cast spinning across the shoproom floor of days and decades like a ring dance or a top, round and round and round she goes, and all we know is nobody knows.
i look younger though!
Yes!
Wash yo butt.