When I Was Your Age
"Can you get off your damn computer at all?
I left this morning and you were sitting there.
I came back and you're sitting there.
There's plenty to do around the house!
When I was your age- "
It's easy to be discounted,
Easy to be cheapened by seniority.
And only in the land of the free do the elderly lobby vociferously from the disgruntled old age home studio, where their families dropped them off like preschoolers, never to be seen again -
Forced to play tag in a treehouse made of alzheimers, misplaced dollars, laminated floors, and steel canes.
Yet youth is the time of emotions,
the time our limbs stretch out in grotesque, asymmetrical ways, ears flapping in the wind, teeth falling from the sky, hair growing grass-roots style, with little fervor and less intelligible direction.
"When I was your age" is supposed to imply that everyone has been a child once, but therein lies the flaw.
As Plato's pal escapes the cave of shadows born anew, and is now the upper part of the brain and not the lower, and certainly not both.
We Kinder, with our drooling noses and shrill voices, are likely the lower part.
And they, acculturated troglodytes, with blood-shot eyes, troubling debt, ulcers, fleeting hairlines, pulled muscles, and wisdom - I'll be damned if they aren't of the higher part of the brain,
most certainly!
The stereotypes are in surround sound these days,
So simple has it become to speculate the livelihood of a Californian based on the car they drive.
And parergons aside,
You know a mistake has been made when you decide that selling the coup for a Quest is really about "having enough room for the kids."
Delusions are the new caffeine,
And I dont blame anybody for having migraines when they realize that self-care via fast fashion is just shorthand for "I'm okay with Anisa's ibu sweating over my sweater."
And so it goes that in the mouth-foaming way us youngens are drawn to change, it no doubt follows that the old, the frail and dependent, the rudely stalwart, are indeed ignored with impetuous derision.
It makes our shiny collarbones rattle when the gender-free bathroom gets a rise out of grandpapa.
Our eyes dilate in disgust when auntie May says she wishes she could have a man as a gay best friend, "just like The Real Housewives!"
But gosh golly, all this forward thinking builds an appetite, so it behooves one to perk up and smile when grandma wants to cook another one of her five-star dishes. She's good for something, if not her opinions,
And we whippersnappers (though the longer lived seem to think otherwise) have good manners, good enough to let them muse about the politique, let them tell us what's right and wrong about our generation, and how "there's no morals these days," because we can't bring on the end of civilization on an empty stomach.
Some will retort spit-fully that I'm just generalizing, that I'm part of the problem, but all people know is the general. We want things "to be less vague" as Baez once said.
The path of least resistance is forever and always the path of least cognizance
Because to dodge road bumps is to say God is real, at least until the Quest is out of gas and tumbling under the weight of its passengers' absolutism.
If the answer was always there, always clear, then dinner would be a silent affair. It wouldn't even matter who cooked because nobody would complain if the entree was lacking.
There wouldn't be white male shooter number 23 or colorless victim number 77.
So for once in my life, when I look out the window and exclaim my excitement about the super moon outside, don't tell me "It'll always be there," because my temper will pop at the thought that your generation could think the moon is invincible, while simultaneously believing that my generation's tantrum is short-lived, when everybody in the room knows (with gusto, now!) that this happens every Thanksgiving.
I left this morning and you were sitting there.
I came back and you're sitting there.
There's plenty to do around the house!
When I was your age- "
It's easy to be discounted,
Easy to be cheapened by seniority.
And only in the land of the free do the elderly lobby vociferously from the disgruntled old age home studio, where their families dropped them off like preschoolers, never to be seen again -
Forced to play tag in a treehouse made of alzheimers, misplaced dollars, laminated floors, and steel canes.
Yet youth is the time of emotions,
the time our limbs stretch out in grotesque, asymmetrical ways, ears flapping in the wind, teeth falling from the sky, hair growing grass-roots style, with little fervor and less intelligible direction.
"When I was your age" is supposed to imply that everyone has been a child once, but therein lies the flaw.
As Plato's pal escapes the cave of shadows born anew, and is now the upper part of the brain and not the lower, and certainly not both.
We Kinder, with our drooling noses and shrill voices, are likely the lower part.
And they, acculturated troglodytes, with blood-shot eyes, troubling debt, ulcers, fleeting hairlines, pulled muscles, and wisdom - I'll be damned if they aren't of the higher part of the brain,
most certainly!
The stereotypes are in surround sound these days,
So simple has it become to speculate the livelihood of a Californian based on the car they drive.
And parergons aside,
You know a mistake has been made when you decide that selling the coup for a Quest is really about "having enough room for the kids."
Delusions are the new caffeine,
And I dont blame anybody for having migraines when they realize that self-care via fast fashion is just shorthand for "I'm okay with Anisa's ibu sweating over my sweater."
And so it goes that in the mouth-foaming way us youngens are drawn to change, it no doubt follows that the old, the frail and dependent, the rudely stalwart, are indeed ignored with impetuous derision.
It makes our shiny collarbones rattle when the gender-free bathroom gets a rise out of grandpapa.
Our eyes dilate in disgust when auntie May says she wishes she could have a man as a gay best friend, "just like The Real Housewives!"
But gosh golly, all this forward thinking builds an appetite, so it behooves one to perk up and smile when grandma wants to cook another one of her five-star dishes. She's good for something, if not her opinions,
And we whippersnappers (though the longer lived seem to think otherwise) have good manners, good enough to let them muse about the politique, let them tell us what's right and wrong about our generation, and how "there's no morals these days," because we can't bring on the end of civilization on an empty stomach.
Some will retort spit-fully that I'm just generalizing, that I'm part of the problem, but all people know is the general. We want things "to be less vague" as Baez once said.
The path of least resistance is forever and always the path of least cognizance
Because to dodge road bumps is to say God is real, at least until the Quest is out of gas and tumbling under the weight of its passengers' absolutism.
If the answer was always there, always clear, then dinner would be a silent affair. It wouldn't even matter who cooked because nobody would complain if the entree was lacking.
There wouldn't be white male shooter number 23 or colorless victim number 77.
So for once in my life, when I look out the window and exclaim my excitement about the super moon outside, don't tell me "It'll always be there," because my temper will pop at the thought that your generation could think the moon is invincible, while simultaneously believing that my generation's tantrum is short-lived, when everybody in the room knows (with gusto, now!) that this happens every Thanksgiving.
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