Happy New Year 2007

Happy New Year!

This year I turn 52 and while not really all that old, still old enough to be standing at the crossroads of Hip and Doofus. It looks like I’m going to go ahead and boogaloo down Doofus Lane.

I read a list this morning... 

 Yes, the list of what’s in and what’s out for the New Year and you know what? I only “get” a little more than half the list and the other part I disagree with. So here I stand, in my Doc Martins’, the new Beck CD in one hand and the “new” Beatles CD, Love in the other and wonder just when, exactly, did I stop being cool.

I don’t mind not being cool anymore; it really doesn’t matter to me. In fact there’s not much in the world more embarrassing that an old coot trying to cling onto cool.

I guess the best thing that us aging baby can do is to grow old gracefully. Yes, you heard

me right fellow 60’s generation, we’re all getting older, fast, and there’s nothing we can do about than to be “cool” about it.

I like a lot of new, hip, cool things. I have an iPod, I write this Blog and I still watch Saturday Night Live. But the difference is that next week my iPod might fall out of being cool and hip or Blogs could become passé and I wouldn’t know it… I’m not living in that young, hip, stream of consciousness anymore. Heck, I don’t even know if cool and hip are cool and hip words these days, my guess is that they are not.

I try very hard not to live in the past and truly try to simply enjoy the moment at hand. I kick myself when I say things to my 15 year old like, “Do you know how much I paid for a gallon of gas the first time I bought it”? He doesn’t care, it’s not interesting to him, it’s just me living in the past…a bad place to be if you ask me.

So, fellow baby boomers, grab your canes, pull up your Depends, turn up your hearing aids and walk, or run if you still can, down Doofus Lane proudly. Let’s leave youth to the young, we’ve had our day, it’s their turn now.

Our job is to support them, guide them if they ask and laugh our old fool heads off at how stupid they look in those jeans with the crotch dragging the ground, how idiotic a young adult looks in a baseball cap turn backwards or worse yet half way around. How bad their music and culture is, wonder how “this” generation will ever run the world and just in general have no respect for their point of view or the things they see as valuable.

And we will do all these things just like our parents did to us…remember? It’s a bout the same time you said to yourself, or out loud, I will never treat my kids this way.

And just like that, in the blink of an eye, we crossed over to that place where we promised ourselves we would never go. We grew up, we left youth behind, we shed our “cool” and became the older generation. And that’s the way God planned it.