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The Middle Ages, or How John Green Messed My Head Up

So last week I sat down to watch John Green‘s Vlogbrothers video called, “A Middle Aged Man.” The title should have tipped me off right from the start. But it didn’t. So there I sat, ready to be entertained by Green’s witty, intelligent, and machine-gun-paced monologue when he points out, right at the beginning of the video, that he’s a middle-aged man. The realization of that shocked him. I laughed. Ha! He’s right! He’s 36 years old, he is, indeed, middle–


That’s not possible, because I’m 36. Not only that, but John Green and I were born on the exact same day. I mean, Steve Guttenberg and Rupert Grint also share a birthday with me, but they were born in different years. Guttenberg is 19 years older and Grint is 11 years younger. But John Green and I? Twins. From different mothers. And different locations.

Goddamn that got weird.

So it stands to reason if John Green is middle-aged, then [gulpso am I.

Which began to make a lot of sense.

When I was a kid in the 1980s, there were a lot of movies and TV shows about adults reaching their mid-30s. I didn’t understand why at the time because in the mid-1980s, I was too young to get it. Between The Big Chill and Thirtysomething, various movies and TV shows where people went back to their hometown or told stories of their childhoods in the 1950s, there was a lot of it. As I got older, I saw even more of that as I read Stephen King’s novel It and novella The Body (the basis of the film Stand By Me) or listened to Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. which features “Glory Days” and “My Hometown,” amongst other songs looking back. Billy Joel was “Keepin’ the Faith” and it seemed everywhere you looked, people were coming to terms with this thing called adulthood.

That has been me for the last year. I’ve been longing, with an ache from my core, to return to those Saturday mornings when cartoons played on TV, and the Creature Double Feature aired on Channel 56 out of Boston. I’ve been longing to go back to the local mall as it looked back then, hit the Waldenbooks, and get myself stuff that isn’t available anymore. To be in a place, for just 24 hours, where the Internet didn’t exist to the public. When movies relied on more than CGI effects and explosions to hold a mass-audience’s interest. I mean, don’t get me wrong, 1984 was no walk in the park. And as Billy Joel sings in the aforementioned song, “The good old days aren’t always good/Tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems.” Make no bones about it, I know I’m looking at things through rose-colored glasses.

But that feeling has been so strong for the last year or two, and I couldn’t figure out why. Until John Green pointed it out. I’m middle-aged. In 30 years, no one would be shocked if I dropped dead. Yeah, 66 isn’t exactly elderly anymore, but…. That’s a chilling sentence to me and I want so badly to delete it, but I’m going to keep it because it makes me uncomfortable.

I work with teenagers, I have a daughter who is turning 16 in two months, and another who is 15-months-old now. They help keep me young, all of them. But still….

There isn’t the kind of looking back now as there was in the 1980s because the Baby Boomer generation was so plentiful. They focused their attention on themselves and on the fact that the generation who would help change the world had become part of the establishment. Rampant crime, the destruction of business laws, the dissolution of personal freedoms, and the biggest chasm between the rich and everyone else since the Great Depression is what they left us with. They also left us with the Civil Rights Act, Equal Rights, free love, and the idea that we are both individuals and parts of a community. Oh, and the ability to be completely self-absorbed.

What will my generation leave behind? Cool status updates and Tweets? Some blogs? Superhero movies?

I don’t know, but I think it’s time I need to think about some things.

Friday Night Lights…Out

Friday. Friday. Friday. F.R.I.D.A.Y. Friday.




I’m tired. Tired. T.I.R.E.D.

But there’s some good.




So that’s that. I should go to bed. Later.

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