The Inspiration in Obsolescence

I met up with a friend last Friday night after a lot of back and forth about whether we should meet up. Neither of us really very interested in denying ourselves the sleep that we would’ve enjoyed rather than hang out but, at the same time, aware that we need to maintain friendships and, well, have a life separate from work or home. 

Despite our reluctance, we managed to have a decent time meeting up at a bar that serves tea and mostly seemed to be hosting an older crowd that night. As I age, I am becoming increasingly disquieted at finding myself at college-age events. The students, who until recently seemed like slightly younger peers have suddenly become children. No matter how I screw up my eyes when I look at them, they live in a world different than mine, and though I don’t warrant the same attention from them, they see the same otherness in me. I have aged out beyond the extent of their imagination. Because they cannot imagine being me—42, three kids—I can no longer remember being among them. And we when we interact, I smile a lot more than is necessary, hoping that will get me seen even though I know it will probably only more firmly place me into an invisible category for them: strangely eager old guy. 

My friend and I sat at our table, drinking immuni-tea. I haven’t had alcohol in over a year now and most people my age are more than willing to skip the beer. No one with young children who is over the age of forty wants to wake up remotely hung over. Saturday morning, you want to be at the top of your game so that when the kids start to tantrum in public you don’t accidentally raise your voice too loud, or so that when the tears come over an everyday injustice, you don’t react too callously, or too “I-told-you-so”.

In our booth, sharing the bitter tea, we talked a little about books, a little about music, but sometimes when I talk about these things now, my old passions desert me. I can’t work up the diatribes I once could. I could sit down with someone who professed an absolute adoration for Crazy Town or Barenaked Ladies and I probably couldn’t work up the indignation I would’ve felt about this before. I might not even be able to make myself care.

Even more frightening, I can get lost in my speech. Unless I’m telling a story, I can forget my point and start babbling, just grabbing at words to try to find my way back to my point. I keep talking but my mind is screaming “what are you saying? You don’t know what you’re saying!” My increased sensitivity to talking too much, or interrupting people only exacerbates this.  

I used to pontificate; I used to hold forth, discourse at length on subjects which interested me and, especially those which bothered me. I can remember telling people how wrong they were in their personal tastes on things. I wasn’t completely serious, I had fun with these conversations, but my opinions flowed thick and fast borne on a steady current of beer breath and cigarette exhalations. If you weren’t with me, I was willing to listen, but I certainly wouldn’t flag on my rebuttal. These days, the person who thought “Come My Lady” was a good song, could probably knock any argument down from me down immediately, if I put up any fight at all. 

But now that I’ve got my tea what I really like is dipping into past revelries with anecdotes—like any other elderly McDonald’s patron with the rustling newspapers and the cheap coffee at 7am. In my senescence, I’ve realized that most of my opinions are only feelings that are not substantiated and, therefore, undebatable. But the stories of being arrested by the Armenian military, of sleeping in an Uzbek brothel so sick I could barely move, New Year’s Eve in Prishtina, skinheads on the Chicago El at 2am, and, especially all the stories produced by the heady foment of punk rock, alcohol, and teenage discontent at growing up in a small blue collar town about an hour west of Detroit. Most people I meet here have had none of these experiences, so I can talk about them without fear of censor and I become more confident in the telling, which impresses my listenership into something like attention, or at least momentary tolerance.

Listen.

“Fuck this shit, this Prison City shit. We’re getting out. This place is bullshit.”

That was a song by the band Disease I played bass for at 16. We used to sing those lyrics with varied attention, varied commitment. They were terrible lyrics after all. But when we were angry at the shared place of our birth, we sang this song as imprecation rather than just angst. We leveled the words at specific instances, people, situations which, we reasoned, would’ve been avoided in another place, another time. 

At 16, Jackson, Michigan was a terrible place because it had no model of a future that we could aspire to reach. No one’s parents reflected our youthful curiosities, and there were no yuppies, or anyone in their 20s or 30s around who were successful in their creativity. If they were creative, it was something they engaged in when they were at home; it was never something anyone was paid for, or held as a profession. 

Much like conservative places the world over, my hometown was only populated with children and adults; there was no substantial group of searching, questioning, curious young people in their twenties and thirties sitting around Dolores Park on a Saturday idly watching the world go by and making plans to impact it some day.The twenty somethings in southern Michigan, at least back then, were emigrating.

Yet, we knew, growing up in proximity to large university towns and, later, the urban poles of Detroit and Chicago, that there were ways out there to redeem our creativity, this jouissance that we screamed in chorus in basement shows, that we danced out on muddy garage floors, that we roamed through when let out of school in our long walk/talks across town ranging in thought and distance. We knew there could be a place for it, it just wasn’t where we were. 

We didn’t dull it with alcohol, we tricked ourselves into believing we were making satisfactory use of the creative force when we drank. When drinking beers on a Friday night, sitting around the park, talking about what had happened that week, or dreaming about the future felt important, like we were constructing something. But in the morning, nothing remained, and we spent the week building it all back up again. We wrote new songs, sewed new patches, planned zines that no one ever made, drank bottomless diner coffees and sketched on napkins. We dissipated all this energy over the weekend screaming into a microphone—unrecorded—or packed into a stationary car on a January night singing along to The Misfits only the glow of our cigarettes betraying our expressions in the dark. 

But back then, o how I was understood, o how I was appreciated for the loud-talking, interrupting, obnoxious kid that I was whose catchphrase was “I haaaaate that!”. My face did not yet have the musculature for an ingratiating smile. I hadn’t eaten the fruit that would force me to see how few people cared about my opinions and I reeked of them, belted them out at the slightest provocation. Ah god, I was so sure and so supported and so contra-bullshit. 

And as annoying as I could be, my friends were my ardent supporters. They saw something in me despite their parents’ objections. And it was obvious they enjoyed my company. For the last ten years or so, I have very rarely felt sure of anyone’s approval. When I speak to anyone now, I must always weigh my words, for I am always being judged by the content of my conversation. Am I being entertaining enough in my speech? Am I being thoroughly intellectual and supporting my conclusions? I feel this current to conversation that must be maintained, and its maintenance is exhausting. I’m always on the verge of dropping the ball and earning the disapprobation of my interlocutor. “Ugh, that guy? He doesn’t know what he’s talking about! Ugh, that guy? He just blabs on and on.” I never felt this when I was a kid with my friends. I talked, they listened, or they talked, and I listened. That’s all there was to the exchange.  

As a result, I maintained a comfort with them that is almost physical. When we are together, maybe once a year, I find myself wanted to lean on them, put my arm around them, be wrapped up in them and protected by them as I once was. 

We have maybe two hours a year to reunite, but they are times I relish because, once together, we can go back to being understood as we once were, we can talk in the off-handed way we once did without worrying about judgement, even without the beer. 

And as I get older, and I feel more detached from the world around me, I find myself thinking more and more about the place that I once declared so brashly to be “bullshit” because all my friends stayed there together, still despising it, but knowing that it was important for their identities to stay twined with that force. The lack of validation kept them creative. They are not employed in traditionally creative sectors, but they have remained profoundly creative because they never tried to sell their creativity; it was never anything with any market value, but rather something vital. They still work all day, go home, put the kids to bed, and then they paint, write songs, sketch, doodle. I don’t know anyone else who makes time for these things. 

When I struggle to find time to meet with new friends; when I feel alienated by the place I have found myself in, I go back to these memories, these friends, and I imagine meeting with them every Sunday morning, having coffee and just talking without direction, just taking comfort in each other’s presence and being revitalized by it. And I understand why immigrants go back home when they are old, why they return to that which they left behind, which they likely held in contempt, because it was the same place that once gave them the confidence to leave, whereas all subsequent places were indifferent to their coming or going. Only the first place can ever say “go ahead, go see the world; I’ll always be here because you can only have one place you are from.” And likewise, those friends will be the only people who remember who you were when you were first filled with the divine afflatus of adolescence and can still restore this feeling for you even, and especially, when you are old because they never knew the you who misplaced confidence, or bumbled through opinions. 

…

Back in the near-present,  my friend and I continued our conversation after the tea had run out and even into the street while I unlocked my bike. I have been fortunate to make new friends—even if I find it difficult to make time to meet with them—because I had such great friends when I was young. They created a paradigm for friendship which may not be easily satisfied, but continuously provides me with good people willing to listen to my stories, even if my arguments are not as potent as they used to be, even if I get a little confused. I can only hope continuing to talk and listen will keep my conversational ability sharp enough for membership with the early morning McDonald’s crowd when I make retirement. That there will still be a place for my talk, and still an audience gracious enough to receive it even when my opinions become nonsensical and removed from all real-world context because, I will still have stories which, as time goes by, only get richer for their increased obsolescence. Perhaps it is what we disdain in argument that we appreciate in stories. If that is so, clear a seat for me on retirement row; I’ve got some whoppers.