I’m thinking about mortality, yeah I’m getting into the last quarter of my life, probably closer to the last 1/10… No matter, death does not hold any fear for me, I have sent many sentinels in front of me to ease my passing. This is not the point of my discourse here. I am more concerned that as the first generation of people to have no generic geriatric signposts as to how to become the elderly, how do we actually get there?
My parents are less than 20 years older than I am, yet they seem to have become elderly without much effort. They just missed the generation who were taught that youth was a life long choice. I held to this theory until Marie died. Up until then I was still on the cutting edge of modern alternative music, had read new novels, watched new cult tv… etc etc. being down with the kids, kept me young in a false paradigm which quickly fell away, and strangely, I no longer feel the need to keep up, I have let go with breath-taking brevity. I no longer care. My formative years, 1972 perhaps is a fulcrum, is now half a century away, and all those pretty boys and girls who sang to us then, are now stuck between two stools, either dead or geriatric. Hard to imagine that these now dusty decrepit old farts were once the heart throbs of a generation….
What is it I’m stuck to describe? That history is not history to us. It was our life and the scary bit is, we recognise that this history is remembered completely wrongly. If this is the case for 1972, where tv, film photos and music was well documented, and yet as history it is nowhere near the reality we remember, what we take for true history for other epochs, for example Victorian days, must equally be far off the mark.
The point to this conversation? I guess it’s don’t believe the hype.
Dale M
future daze 