Between my writing and your reading, I turned 50.
As the days dwindle on this side of the divide, I find myself slumping toward this landmark. It seems more ominous to me than either 30 or 40, which are so resonant culturally. Thirty closes "young adulthood" and 40 launches "middle age." I turned 30 in Lawrence, Kansas, where I worked for the daily newspaper and I solemnized the occasion with a column that marveled about still enjoying pop music. But if 50 is the new 40, back then 30 was the new 50. I turned 40 with a marriage and a mortgage in Raleigh, North Carolina, and a swarm of friends who surprised me, making 40 neither the new nor the old anything, but just fine.
Fifty, though, is something else. Somewhere on the road from 40, I passed the unmarked middle of my life, for one likely thing. I have to acknowledge that most readers of Las Vegas Weekly are younger than me, like its staff. And sometimes I feel older in ways I didn't at those other markers. I sense the shift from critic to crank as the little patience I've commanded over the years crumbles, with drivers, with national news, with any number of inanities in a culture that is just starting to seem foreign to me, in the way that some octogenarians don't get, and don't want, computers. I measure this in the interval it takes for me to become aware of someone popular, a musician or actor, or "reality star." I had been imprinted, dimly, with knowledge of a cable program titled Gastineau Girls, and recently learned, without really trying to and to little surprise, that my wild guess was correct that they would be daughter and divorcée of a former New York Jets linebacker. I'd been able to pull the relevant shards of pop experience off their shelves but it had taken a while to get to them, and maybe that interval was better spent noting other things. In a crotchety old-guy kind of way.
It goes without saying that any of you with children are older than me. If there is an age/zeitgeist ratio, surely there is a parenthood index, tracking the degree to which managing the fates of assorted helpless young humans ages you beyond the childless. Anyway, I honor your choice, and admit that I wouldn't be ruminating so anxiously were I cruising past 50 on the way to a son's wedding or daughter's graduation, and remembering to arrange for the youngest's dance lessons. Via Blackberry, of course.
Watching, over long and short absences, the children of our friends grow up has enriched several old friendships. But it is their generation, focus of so much marketing, money and power, with which I begin to sense a breach, an alienation measured by no index, only by a vague unease. It's not that you don't want to grow old in their world, rather that you expect to exit without regret. On the other side of that illogical ledger, though, is a sincere interest in many new things, shared, I must add, by many parents I know. What better scale here than my iPod? I scan my library and find refreshing assortment of music new and old, pop and more. If anything, my tastes are broader than they were at age 30, more expansive and curious.
As it happens, the iPod, and devices like it, epitomize what might be the central cultural shift of our time. Evidence is found in the new radio format, Jack, as Richard Abowitz reported recently in these pages. It is the absence of format, the station providing the service of shuffle-play. Of course, it turns out to be the shuffle program of a iPod whose owner is mired in a middle-of-the-road rut. It's not as great a paradigm-dodge as it seems.
No question, though, that we live in a society in which random, or no choice, is often the choice to make. Given the number and range of choices you have to process in prosecuting daily life, letting someone or something else pick the music can be a blessing. The wearying, where-for-dinner discussion that we all have from time to time is a desperate prayer for an imposed decision. Afterward, we click through 500 channels, never settling on any one, mesmerizing ourselves with the menagerie.
If this shuffle-play ideal encapsulated an earnest desire to experience life in a Zen-like state, or to broaden one's horizons, I would cheer. And maybe that's what future generations will do, appreciate the world with open minds and hearts, absorbing ranges of experience, instead of the narrow paths of specialization that previous generations have given us.
But my crusty old soul suspects otherwise. We enjoy so many choices in everything, from colors of toothbrushes to air-freshener scents to Google hits, we can't be bothered with all of them. Just as some of us have so much stuff we have to rent space to store it, we choose to outsource some of our choices. Just play something, already. Or worse, we make none. The apparent abandonment of news by the young is particularly troubling; that "lack of trust" could mask mere impatience with paying attention and making decisions. How much simpler to have our opinions formed by comics and bloggers?
I'd like to shuffle-play more of life in coming years. But I can't help making judgments. That's getting old for you.
Chuck Twardy is a really smart guy who has written for several daily newspapers and for magazines such as Metropolis.