AGE OLD LAMENT

The kids have it right. It is all about age. It has been for all eternity. There are exceptions of course, where the amount of time spent alive doesn’t equate with production or wisdom and the elders have a thing or two to teach young upstarts. I blame rock and roll. It presents a single paradigm of teen age infallibilty where you tell the Man where to go, hold up the finger to life itself and say, “take me if you can.” For some, this moment goes by in a flash and then they find themsleves married with kids and working at a bank. For others, it remains unfinished business to be continually parsed in retrospect. This can be frustrating and it hurts when one gets to an age where you aren’t taken the least bit seriously by either quarter no matter what you have to offer. Nobody cares if you met David Byrne or not. You are past it, an aging punk rocker with stories to tell to the people at the bank and your kid’s school where they eye you suspiciously. Of course, you can try to establish yourself – in order to get health care – within a more refined and polite society, one that you’d never thought you’d have anything to do with. The strange thing is, once there, you find yourself to be the most polite and refined thing on offer within several square miles.