Heart and Mind

When Old Stuff Keeps Getting Older

On this blog, as all my (many, many, many) readers know, I like to talk about stuff related to the passage of time. It's an endless source of inspiration. And I've always been really comfortable with the idea that things get old and dated.

What I realized lately is that I'm starting to get a little uncomfortable with the fact that stuff that I have always considered "old" does, in fact, keep getting even older. It's becoming even more quaint and, disturbingly, closer to extinction.

Let's take something like "the sixties," speaking in just very general terms. The sixties, to me—unlike the eighties or to a certain degree the seventies—has been something that always seemed old and dated to me. I wasn't alive in the sixties and saw nothing first hand. So anything that came from that era—the Beatles, hippies, John F. Kennedy, the Dick Van Dyke show—always seemed dated to me, like something from a different era. Because for someone born in 1971, it always was. And that was totally cool with me, because I like that sort of thing.

But if that stuff seemed old-fashioned to me in 1988, I didn't stop to really think about how it would just continue to get older. It's now twenty years later and it's gone from being old to really old, and that saddens me a bit. I was comfortable with the idea that Beatles and hippies and other young stallions of the sixties were, when I was growing up, actually aging, middle-aged squares, but I am finding myself uncomfortable with the idea that they are now retired and "senior citizen" in nature. Where will they be twenty years from now? Do the math.

I was watching "The Partridge Family" the other day (that's a subject for another blog entry) and had the same kind of thoughts. Yes, in the eighties I found it amusing and interesting that the young Keith with his hip, shag 'cut and 70s lingo was, in fact, no longer the teenager he was playing but was, in fact, in his thirties. And in the nineties, I found it cool that he was in his forties. But it seems odd to me that he's almost sixty now. Keith Partridge should not be sixty, as he will be in less than two years.

Time just marches on. Like with the Beatles, John Lennon was killed when I was about nine, so I have always accepted the idea that one of the members of one of my cherished bands was gone, but there was this sense that the other three would remain. When George Harrison passed on, that was really weird. There was a joke (in poor taste, mind you) I used to hear that went, "What would it take for a Beatles reunion?" Answer: "Three more bullets." It bothers me a lot that that punchline makes no sense anymore. I had accepted the Beatles as a 3 and 1 thing, not a 2 and 2 thing.

I guess what ultimately is unsettling is the idea that cherished pieces of past lore and nostalgia will likely continue to become more and more obscure—even more so than it is already—and much of it will be forgotten. It all points to a certain insignificance of everything. It's the idea that only a few generations actually cross paths in this world.

posted by Steve @ 10:27 PM