I'm Twenty and Distressingly Old

I'm of the opinion that oldies stations on the radio should play old music. Many of you (all of you) would support me in this and you're probably wondering why I wasted space, time, and keystrokes on that statement. But give me a minute. It needed to be said, believe it or not.

Last night I was driving home from a family dinner and since I hate the crushing silence of a car without the radio on, I pushed the knob on the dashboard and selected number three on my presets list: the local Golden Oldies station. While I, myself, am quite young at the tender age of Twenty years, I enjoy music of pretty much any era prior to the current one, filled as it is with useless rap and a pathetic imitator of "pop". I like listening to the Beach Boys, or Bobby Fuller, or Aretha Franklin, or any other luminary of the fifties and sixties from time to time and I've come to know this radio station as a host of such music. That said, I also like the seventies, eighties, and nineties and have radio stations catering to those needs set to other numbers on the display.

Imagine, if you will, the utter bewilderment I experienced when I turned on the home of "California Girls" and was met with "Little Red Corvette", a song from 1983! A damn fine song, too, but that's not the point. The point is that the Golden Oldies station apparently decided that the fifties and sixties, the Beach Boys and the Temptations, were officially too old to be considered "golden" oldies. I guess they're bronze oldies now, relegated to some iffy on-and-out AM signal. In their place are the seventies (Norman Greenbaum's "Spirit in the Sky" followed "Corvette") and eighties (Hall and Oates' "Kiss on My List" followed "Spirit"). Like I said, I like these eras (indeed, I have a slightly unhealthy fascination with the eighties that will surely make it self evident in due time on this site), but now I no longer have the option of two other decades I liked.

Well, OK, I could probably find that mythic AM signal (but fuck that, AM is hardly listenable with it's tinny, other-end-of-the-tunnel sound quality), or go on the internets and find a true oldies station (though that would do me no good in the car), but I still find this whole thing distressing for another reason: This means that the seventies and eighties are officially old. I was born in the Eighties (the tail end - 1987 - admittedly). Does this make me old, too? I can't imagine being old. In fact, I've more than once sworn to myself that I would commit suicide if natural causes didn't claim me before I hit forty, which isn't even half-way to the average life expectancy these days!

Despite popular belief of the opposite, being old is bad. A tragedy, I would dare say. You're outdated and pretty much worthless for any task other than wasting air us young'uns could be breathing, and slowing us down on the highways and byways of this Earth with your horrendous driving. Everyone who isn't old resents everyone who is, whether we admit it or not. It's just a universal truth, bred into our genes over time. After all, an insane love for the elderly would have been bad for our evolution progress - the young and virile would be eaten because they'd stick behind to help the oldest pack members escape the stampede of elephants or whatever. Meanwhile, the ones who resented the elderly just saved themselves and went on to make babies. In today's world, people who tolerate the elderly face problems like changing grandpa's depends or going ten MPH on the freeway because Grammy wanted to drive today, and then you're just horribly late for everything for the rest of the day. It's just simple logic: being old, or caring for the old, is a negative. And I don't need negatives. I haven't the time for them, being half-way to my self-set life cutoff point. I only have time for positives, like getting where I'm going on time and moving on from WW2 already.

But here I come back to the issue of that cutoff point. When I set it (in the before time, when fucking Stan Bush wasn't a golden oldie), forty seemed old enough because I'd still be technically young, and I would have had a lot of time to do what I wanted to. While the latter point remains true, the former, I fear, may not. If things from the decade of my birth are already old, then I'll be downright ancient by the time forty comes.

To me, this is a dilemma worthy of much consideration and debate. This, I think, should give you a good idea of what kind of person I am, and act as decent introduction to this blog.