© Pierre Maré,
2004 - 2007
Offbeat 04
Apparently I am growing up. Although I still feel as if I am sixteen, there are definite signs that even I can recognize. I am not talking about gray hairs. I found the first of those little suckers a few years ago on the fresher side of thirty. I am talking about the creeping symptoms of maturity that cause people like my wife and mother to breathe a sigh of relief.
For instance, there’s always a ‘valid’ reason for drinks after work: having a good day, a bad day, a birthday, an average day, surviving a meeting, leaving early or working late. Just ask any young guy. In my case, I haven’t been hanging out at my regular waterhole for quite a while now. I could take up golf and chalk the drinks up to vital networking, but the spirit is weak, and so is my liver. See what I mean?
I don’t really care what people think of me any more either, but not because I have had a couple of drinks too many. It’s due to the fact that I have other things that keep me focused: my family for one, money for another, and even working out how to survive tomorrow, though I know I won’t have a crippling hangover.
I have the pressing desire to stay home and watch my daughter rub banana into the carpet, rather than going to parties and watching other peoples’ carpets get stained.
In my defense, I still read comics from time to time, though they are called graphic novels nowadays, involve a lot more thought and cost a bundle. I still load up computer games, but only because it’s more diverting to blast everything in sight myself, rather than mindlessly watching some younger guy do the same thing on TV. And I still have a hankering for Lego Technics, though that is well beyond my personal budget for now.
For some reason, maturity brings with it a certain twisted jadedness. The critical social relevance of wet T-shirt competitions and chug-a-lugs just fades away.
The troublesome aspect of maturity is that what I used to define as excitement goes on without me. There are still young people out there who are living the wild life, but I am excluded. I don’t even have the pleasure of passing on the lessons of my experience by introducing a younger generation to that really evil bottle of German stuff, and then sniggering as they go cross-eyed and start speaking in tongues. They only get going when it’s well past my bedtime.
On the upside, maturity has its special moments. Revolving credit, asset finance and overdrafts have introduced me to exciting new realms of personal finance that I never knew existed, and that occasionally make me wish I had never been born. I realize that the rock stars I wished I could become are aging equally gracelessly, and that I still have a chance if I can find the time and energy to learn how to play the guitar.
Fashion requirements are somewhat less complex as well. If I wear a pair of faded, tattered jeans with entirely the wrong label, it’s OK: that’s what old, unfashionable guys wear. My old jeans are also a whole lot cheaper than the latest range of pre-aged, pre-faded, pre-torn designer label jeans without which kids can’t define themselves.
I have the good fortune to have a kid of my own, so I can still aspire to owning Lego Technics, buy a Play Station without embarrassment and explain away that rather cool CD that I don’t want anyone else to know I am listening to. It doesn’t really matter that she is still a toddler: I instinctively want to share the pleasure of everything I wanted, and still want. It’s natural, if horrifyingly expensive and a quick way to spoil both of us.
I’m caught somewhere between the desire to be the young person that I once was and the desire to explore the more sedate pleasures of a new horizon, even if it does involve going to bed before ten. Perhaps a few more years will give me a better perspective on the situation. And who knows… John Lee Hooker cut a few very credible albums in his eighties. Maybe one day I can embarrass my daughter and recapture my youth by becoming an aging rock star.
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