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It’s Still Rock and Roll To Me

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There was a comedian, it may have been Seinfeld, that had a bit about men hitting a style wall at some point in their lives. Some peak moment where they decide, this is as far as I’m going, this is the look I’m going with. Whatever it is.

I find a lot of truth in that. For a time, we get drug along with whatever styles and trends come along, often because of availability more than choice, but there is some part of us that resists and prefers to wear what we thought was cool whenever we considered ourselves cool. 

This whole mid-life crisis nonsense is boring and predictable, utterly unoriginal and annoying to me. I feel relevancy and originality slipping away. I find myself discounting new ideas slowly, but surely, just small things at the moment, ideas and definitions, but I fear an onslaught of new intel that will change how we perceive the world and I will no longer be willing to go along. I can see how this happens. 

Bill Burr joked about Don Sterling, the owner of the LA Clippers as someone who just outlived his acceptable racism quotient. He was in the mainstream for most of his life and then just couldn’t make the transition. 

I was never racist or sexist before, nothing outside of the mainstream anyway, but I can see that if I’m not careful, I will be accused of being an old bigot, sooner or later. It might not even be race or gender that I come down on the wrong side of. Now we are ableists or ageists, or some other made up word. Side note for all your language Nazi’s, all words are made up. Also, when we were growing up, people still remembered fighting Nazi’s so they continue to be bad guys in our minds. 

I continue to believe that youth and new ideas are what make the world go round. Put more young people in charge of more things, and we will all be better off. But I still have power and money and I’m going to do what’s best for me in the end. So be nice to me, or I won’t go along with your little plan to change the world. Now you probably won’t and I probably won’t either, which I guess is how we get to where we are now. 

What a funny bunch of monkeys—just a bunch of talking apes with delusions of grandeur. We can’t even get groups that live next door to one another to get along but we’re going to pretend that we’re all the same now? Sure we are. There is no such thing as gender or race or sexuality or identity. Everyone is their own god now and nothing matters. Maybe this is the path forward, but it’s hard to see. The funny thing about wisdom born of age is that you’ve been down dead end streets before. Things don’t always go according to plan. Who would have thought plaid bell bottoms would ever go out of style? 

Like I said, I feel relevancy slipping away, not because I can no longer comprehend the changes, but because I no longer care. I think that’s when it happens. I’m pretty sure I hit the style wall as well. I will continue to cycle along with what I know, tweaking things according to what’s available, but people will look at me and guess how old I am, simply by what I’m wearing. 

We all think we will be cool old people when we are young. We will all raise hell and buck the system to our deaths, right? Wrong. Most of us drift off into obscurity, unable to program the VCR, defiantly wearing our faded jeans, and listening to music we insist is relatively new even though it’s considered classic, at best now. 

Bob told us to take those old records off the shelf. We could sit and listen to ’em by ourselves. Billy asked what’s the matter with the clothes we were wearing? Our ties were too wide for the age of jive. Reminding us that we couldn’t dress trashy till we spent a lot of money. 

I did order some funky new glasses, but I’m still sporting cargo shorts and cuffing my jeans. The beard is getting long and grey, I don’t recognize anyone on the awards shows anymore and I definitely want you off my lawn. I just don’t know if I can keep making the transition. 

Remember when we were going to live forever?

About the author

David Todd McCarty

David Todd McCarty is a writer, director, photographer and cinematographer. He writes fiction and nonfiction essays as well as journalism. You can see his commercial work at http://www.hoppingfrogstudios.com

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