I have had two coworkers in the department since I came over about three years ago. They are both older than me, so I consider them both almost equal in age, or I did. The other day it occurred to me that one must be in her sixties, while the other just turned 50. Now that I’m 42, I’m closer to her, than she is to our colleague in her sixties. I’m sure she thinks of it this way, and, yet, to me, they were both “older”: a category which we all define once we are out of our twenties as “the people who are a few years older than we are” all the way up to nonagenarians. As you age, this category ages with you.
Of course, there are moments of clarity. I work with young people mostly one day a week, and the experience of being jarred out of my pretended youth is concentrated. Many of these young people betray no differences between us, but others insist on reminding me of our difference in age by reminding me that they were not born and therefore couldn’t have witnessed 9/11, or that when Covid really got bad were only 12 years old.
Did that happen, like, last year?
Still, the world, or at least our society was made for the old. The culture the predominated when I was a kid is still a referent and our tendency to revere things we couldn’t have been around for have made me something of a cool museum piece. I’m always telling my kids things like “Ninja Turtles, ya’ know, I was around when it first came out.” I guess this would’ve been like my dad telling me the same thing about GI Joe. But, c’mon, GI Joe was never a ninja, nor a turtle. Also, the kids these days are obsessed with this grindy, DIY band that my friends and I were obsessed with back when the band was still around. The other day I was in the record store, flipping through the “Punk” section and wondering what 50% of what I was looking at was, when a kid came over with an employee.
“I know it’s been repressed a few times, but I don’t think we have one.”
“Yeah, it’s been on a few labels now, but it’s a classic.”
They came over and flipped through the “D” section. I looked out of the corner of my eye. The kid’s disappointment was almost tangible as the employee announced :”no, we don’t have it. Do want me to put your name down in case any Dystopia records come in?” In 1999 (or maybe 2000), when Dystopia was on tour for their second and last album “The Aftermath”, a carload of friends of mine headed up to Detroit to see them. I was still at the age when I was having trouble getting permission for this kind of thing, but as it turned out, shortly after that show, my mom got tired of arguing about it, and I went up to the Trumbullplex for many subsequent shows. In short, I very nearly saw Dystopia live.
Thank god I didn’t though. Who knows how long I would subject this kid—and others like him—to my “yup, I saw them back in ‘99” stories?
I tend to keep my memories to myself around the youth. It’s taken me a few years to realize that I am from another time, and that my experiences, too, are of that impossible-to-fathom period and therefore something like fiction. But there is one thing that I, if I were able to condense into something intelligible, I would tell these youngsters.
There’s a lot of talk now about letting yourself be bored. And occasionally, while going to the bathroom, or waiting for something to load on the computer at work, I have to assert myself over the desire to pick up my phone and see what’s going on in the world, or check my email. The news, local or national, is outrageous and depressing, it’s designed that way, and the emails usually make me feel like I need to be working faster, or remind me that I’ve forgotten something, or still have something else to squeeze into the day. No, it’s better if I just start at the wall a minute. When I leave work (or the bathroom) there are also my kids.
It's incredible how many parents complain about their kids’ use of screens, but then constantly produce their phones for little tasks. Turns out phone use is something like aging: we always think it’s someone else’s issue, no matter how often we are checking email, or even just looking things up!
There’s more to this, too, advocates very rightly say that there’s a creative power in learning to deal with boredom. I did a lot of dumb things in my quest to alleviate my boredom. Once, I climbed up on the roof and thought “I could make a secret entrance here that no one would ever see” but after I’d broken through the outer covering, I realized the myriad flaws in my thinking.
I think of things like this, shudder, and hope my wife’s common sense wins over in our kids.
However, you know what I also did? I made things, and a lot of them were inspired by burgeoning feelings of love. And while these things weren’t impressive in their own right, making them cultivated an ability to focus that I, otherwise, would never have developed, which has been such an important factor in successfully navigating the adult world.
I imagine the temptation is too great, when one develops one’s first crush, to not just hang out on the object of affection’s social media pages. When I was a kid, all I had was the one grainy, black and white photo in the year book (maybe a millimeter of a color collage, too if you were lucky), and I spent plenty of time mooning over that, imagining her voice, speaking gently to me, imaging the smile in the picture being the result of something clever I’d said.
But yearbook photos can only offer so much solace for love. I used them more as starting points to clarify the picture I had in my head, but from there, inspiration dictated that I create something. It wasn’t enough to feel something so beautiful and calming and just sit there with it, nor would it have been right to just walk around with it and go about my day. No, something had to be made!
It started innocently enough as daydreaming plans to impress. I would imagine things I could do or buy that would make me worthy of her attention. But I learned quickly that buying things for someone you like doesn’t go beyond the moment you hand the object to them. After that, you’re back to where you were a moment before. And the first girlfriend I ever had cited “you bought me too many things” as the reason, or one of the reasons, for our breakup. Of course, I was 11 or 12.
My second girlfriend endured much longer, and while we spent a lot of time on the phone together, I found an easier confessional in letters. It was in letters that I first declared my love, in letters which I first confided in her my dreams for the future, a future I had hoped we’d share, and it was in letters where we built this future.
We wrote that at night. She probably did them after her homework or something, I wrote them instead of doing my homework, probably because, as enamored as I was, I couldn’t focus on homework. I had to get the thoughts, the declarations, the intentions, the whole incredible-yearning-for-the-future out somehow!
We went out all through jr. high and I amassed a substantial collection of folded 8 ½ x 11 notebook pages, each one with my name simply on the top fold. Some of the better ones with a heart around the name. By the second year, they all ended with “I love you”. The letters paved the way for this salutation that we could never bring ourselves to say.
In high school, punk rock diversified my interests, and, while I thought about girls, I sewed patches on my sweatshirts, pushed studs into my backpack, and eventually, started writing with no direct addressee.
I sat for countless hours with these intense feelings of love and well-being and tried to work them into things: a poem, a drawing, or an outfit. I could just as easily have squandered these thoughts and feelings while mooning over countless photos and posts across several social media accounts, and, very likely, would have, had it been a possibility because, when you’re in love, what better than a facsimile of your beloved, a digital effigy, pieces of her frozen in an array of moods, attitudes and poses. Hell, probably better than the real thing in that you can stare and stare and stare and no one will think less of you for it—after all, that’s what it’s all there for, right? To be looked at?
I have, once or twice in the last few years, been tempted on to social media, saw what a distant friend was up to via their posts and closed my account pleased to have caught up with them, but, of course, I hadn’t caught up with them. They knew nothing of me. We hadn’t connected, I had merely peeked into their curated life and realizing this, I had to resist the temptation to call them or write to them and tell them I’d looked at their social media page. Number 1, kind of a weird way to reconnect with someone you haven’t spoken to in five or nine years. Number 2, it would take too much time. When so much time has gone by, one doesn’t simply say “hi” and then duck back out of an old friend’s life.
The issue is that my glimpse into their life was undetected. Likewise, all the teenagers looking into each other’s social media posts, all the photos, opinions, documented real-life events, and there to be perused and with impunity.
While I’d had very strong feelings in early adolescence, the first actually dizzying feeling I felt for someone wasn’t until my senior year of high school and with this, I remember staring out over my parents’ snowy backyard in the porchlight for hours just focusing on how I saw it, focusing on the details individually, or taken together. I remember watching TV and not watching TV, being so in my head that the music of VH1 made tears start from my eyes. I talked to her while I drove around, imaging what I would say, how I would say it. I took the feelings, the strongest feelings we will ever feel, those of young love, and upended them, explored them, let them shape my trajectory, as I believe we were meant to do.
If I had had social media, I can’t help but think, knowing what I know of my tendencies with it now, and what I see of its use, that I wouldn’t have committed to this critical moment in the same way, or, that I would’ve entirely squandered it, by making an altar or her posts. What’s worse, who can say what the development of this empty habit would’ve led to? I would’ve begun scrolling pages of my crushes in jr. high, even elementary school, by late high school, such an action would be cultivated and natural. I might never even consider the possibility of creating something to channel those feelings, or even just watching the snow fall.
Ever generation has the privilege of being that last to do something noble or beautiful that had carried through ages. Cars did away with the ubiquity of the horse. Mass production of food did away with our generational knowledge of planting cycles. Phones and televisions gave us entertainment away from our neighbors—our community— and made us less social. I have the distinct old person’s privilege of seeing something good and tangible pass away without notice of those who would’ve inherited it. I can see it so distinctly, a box filled with notebook pages, filled with words, drawings, directions, linear notes: all the things teenage love compelled us to make in our stoppered up desire to speak it. To have known it so well, and have found so much inspiration in it, it seems to me like the records of an entire civilization, but, who knows, maybe mooning over social media posts will eventually lead the kids to find some incredible way to express themselves. After all, they managed to find Dystopia.