Just ain't the way it seems (can you recall my Love Buzz?)

I've written before of songs inexplicably popping in to my head (in this post it was "Arthur's Theme") in moments when it's quiet. It's not having annoyingly ubiquitous songs that I've heard recently (sometimes called "earworm") get stuck in there but ones springing from the depths of my unconsciousness. It's simply what my brain does sometimes. I've come to accept it, and now to be intrigued by what the mind will pull out.

~

One morning this past week the song that ran through my mind for no discernible reason while I was getting ready (i.e., one that I had not recently heard or had cause to think of): "Love Buzz" (the Nirvana cover of a Shocking Blue song).

What of that?

~

The change of the calendar puts the album on which Nirvana included "Love Buzz"—1989's Bleach— completely over 20 years old.

A child born the same day that Bleach was released (not that it was a milestone at the time, but sticking with the point of reference my sub-conscious chose for me) will this year be old enough to join me in a bar by the middle of the year. (If I still went to bars, that is.)

It was bound to happen (assuming I lived that long) that the world would reach the twenty-first anniversary of that album's debut but it's something that seems remarkable, even though it's remarkable only in how ordinary it is. Every marker for a particular time will eventually be twenty-one years gone. In the first week of 2031 the days we're experiencing now will be two decades and a year in the past. Somehow I doubt that those days that precede my 63rd birthday will strike me the same way if some random song that came out (or, by our current frame of reference, will come out) in 2010 pops in to my head.

I was about to ponder if this is the sort of reaction that someone who remembered the first wave of Beatlemania in 1963 felt when 1984 came around, but the parallel would only exist if that person were in his/her early twenties (give or take) in those first years of the '60s, and thus to be in his/her forties when L.A. hosted the Olympics and Reagan got re elected. (Of course, 1984 would not be as apt to inspire reflection as would the beginning of what is considered a new decade, but perhaps this hypothetical person was also a fan of George Orwell and would take that year as a time to ponder the passage of time, as I'm more or less doing now.)

It's not merely the passage of any period of twenty-one years; it's the passage of those twenty-one years from more or less one's twenty-first year until the twenty-first anniversary of that year.

In 2000 a song from my adolescence would not have elicited some reflection on the twenty or so years that had elapsed. No, it requires the perspective of taking those first steps in to adulthood, and then looking back at those from the first steps into middle age. (I'm not suggesting I feel like I'm on the precipice of middle age, but what other aging milestone term is there?) The forties are an age where one doesn't feel that old but the first decade of one's life where one can look back 20 years and see events that transpired while one was, technically, an adult.

We'll get in to that a bit more in another post. (Yeah. Something for you to look forward to.)

~


That I focus on the legal drinking age in the U.S. as my benchmark I cannot entirely explain. It's not as though alcohol has ever played a significant role in my life. Maybe it's more the implication about being able to walk in to a bar or a liquor store—without a fake I.D.—that connotes some significance, some tiny level of genuine maturity. (I know when I was 21 I was still pretty much an idiot, but I was far less of an idiot than I was at 18.) Maybe it's more a matter of hitting 21 being that point where one finally gains the full benefits (to the extent that being able to buy booze is a boon to anyone) of adulthood. (No, getting a discount on one's car insurance at 25—assuming one started driving at 16—is not worthy of being a milestone.) 21 is young, but somehow more than being a year older than being 20.

In any case, it's almost certainly this change: Over these past few years when I've met people who were in their early twenties—who were old enough to purchase a drink—and I did the math in my mind I would have that moment where I thought, When you were born I was I was still in high school, or, When you were born I was in my early college years, and now it will be, When you were born I was already getting in to this bar, and now here you are standing next to me ordering a beer, too.

People older than me are undoubtedly looking at that with a tiny bit of condescension, thinking, Guess what, Doug, you're old, and I would note that in my mind I've been old; this is merely a different phase of old.

~

The beauty of aging is that it sneaks up on you. Some might consider that a detriment, but the wonderful aspect of 21 years elapsing on you is that the daily routine kept you distracted from noticing it happening. Otherwise you'd never have an old song pop into your head  (that in your mind you still considered to be a newish song) and have a nostalgic rumination on how those intervening years have gone, and how glad you are that you're not still an idiotic 21-year-old, but take comfort that you still remember that song like you were.

~

Have a thought on this? Notice the link below for sharing. It might get that song out of your head.