“Unkown to me what resideth here:
     Tears flow from a sense of unworthiness and gratitude.”
     -ancient Japanese poem

I swear that the contrast is up too high on my life right now. Between the realization that I have too many hang-ups, DVD’s, political causes and magazine subscriptions and the white-hot reality that is Election Day, I can’t even relax at home.

Sometime recently, I believe it was Tuesday, I felt the shudder that is slipping into a new demographic. It was harsh, involved at least three hours of cable programming, a bill in the mail and a bottle of Pete’s Wicked. The latter was the kicker as it fully and completely dawned on me that I was not drinking a microbrew. Then I watched as VH1 played three consecutive songs from my teenage years (these would be the years where I dyed my hair and railed against norms). Finally I opened an envelope to find the invoice for an expensive dental correction. My hands trembled. My head cocked back in disbelief. My veins sighed. I was suddenly not in the same target marketing zone as the typical buyer of the latest Interpol CD. In fact, my Robert Smith t-shirt may now appear ironic. MTV2 plays like 4pm any MTV afternoon in 1993 and VH1 is the gay cousin of my old outpost of cool, 120 Minutes.

I had wandered out of the bullseye of parental and administrative ire into the pea-green waiting room of late twenties, early thirties (complete with entire annual runs of old Rolling Stone, Raygun and Spin magazines on the end-tables but only one stray copy of Filter). There is still some fight here, and suddenly I know why Henry Rollins has been acting so deliberately antagonistic for two decades. It’s, “hey look at me!” It’s, “hey I can still shake things up!” It’s fucking sad, is what it is.

But also, not so sad. Despite the fact that I now didactically interpret the finer points of all Kevin Smith movies (even Jersey Girl, the true test of the late-twenties man with daughter) I can still act irrationally as I want. I wear the tees one size too small. I proudly display semi-ironic imagery and obscure band items to attract attention, if only slight. Except that when I wear a National Novel Writing Month shirt it’s not a quirky purchase, it’s because I’m actually participating and I thought it would be neat to-- oh okay, I get it. I’m too deep to be shallow, not even in a good way. My entire infrastructure of rebellion has become in some way pedestrian. I find myself almost wanting to attend town council meetings, for goodness sake, and not to disrupt it or protest mall curfew hours. Sure I can still play Six Degrees with most “alternative” artists from 1989-1997, but what in the hell does that get me? At least I can still cull some gems. Centro-Matic. I could go on, but I’m merely writing down band names to please myself at this point.

I think it was Chris Cornell of Audioslave and formerly Soundgarden who said, “I haven’t played this song [Temple of the Dog’s “Hunger Strike”] in ten years…And I’m just amazed that there’s something I am doing now that I can say I haven’t done in ten years.”

And our world is complex. Not just in a Kerry vs. Bush way, but in a way that suggests that nuance is inevitable and often the unraveling of many a cause. Things change fast as we slowly digest what’s going on, risking our timing. We’ve gone from Gelfling to those lumbering things from the Dark Crystal. It seems like yesterday in the political timeline that I could cast a vote for Nader and not be yelled at by every demographic. Hell, it was cool to do so, and especially in Virginia, where we were told it would do not good. Not having any effect despite our protest is what we built our entire lives on anyway, right? Like a constitutional vegetarianism.

I think it mostly stems from the same place. My anger of yore and the sensitivities of today, that is. It all is a bit of defensive reaction to change. Whether it’s a parent telling you how to dress to one telling you how to raise your child, it’s all relative. Sure, there’s not too many cool points in publicly refusing the charms of the Wiggles, but dammit the principle between not buying into their crap or NSYNC’s is the same I tell you!

All of this is exponentially more confusing in Appalachia. Here, if you are rural with a family than you are expected to take a side in matters of local import. City-bound people don’t have to be as engaged for some reason, but you get roped in once a kid starts going to school anyway (and the fights I’ve seen on school district choice rival any I’ve seen at concerts between thugs). Here people actually fight about whether to renovate old stadiums. In northern Virginia they would have built three and a mini-mall just to shut everyone up. There is a spirit of renovation, re-visitation if you will, in everything we do from backwards-looking tourism and novelty (trains, anyone?) to the reclamation of neighborhoods or the simple, delightful status-quo of the country life. That latter requires a certain amount of work on the aging alternative character’s part: fit or be fitted when it comes to this, and I’ve seen a number of transplants, especially young ones, try very hard but ultimately decide that the atmosphere or culture isn’t for them.

Surprise! We’re just as clueless about our environment at 28 than any other time in our life. Longevity is merely a suggestion of age and experience is still continually overrated if not paired with context.

As I painfully pass into the next demographic like a kidney stone, it’s predominantly a formality. My conversion into a sensitive being began more than two dozen years ago, I’ve just traded in the guns for diplomacy. And much to my chagrin, MTV2 for VH1.
There is a certain point where you just learn to deal. And you’re somehow even more starry-eyed than you were before about that which you do not know. It’s a willing naivety to serve as an antidote for all the serious crap you deal with every hour of every day. We need the simple, easy nostalgia to serve as a chaser for balancing our checkbook. This is why we wear the Transformers or Thundercats crap, why does anyone else? See we’re the ones who will actually try and hold a conversation on the imagery and virtues of these shows like some living episode guide to fictional properties of 1976-1990. We don’t actually hate Hot Topic shoppers, we just want everyone to understand what it means to have seen Nightmare Before Christmas in the theaters. Or to have longed for that NES system on a Christmas holiday (and not a used one from Star City Games). We have histories for this crap and it remains our tether from our current demographic perch to the last. We used to be marketed to for He-Man, now we’re peddled ESPN the Magazine.

We examine what we don’t know and want to play with what we do. We orate flippantly, but don’t mean it. We sound condescending but it’s our need for experiential validation. We can’t wait to inundate our children with what we’ve learned (and I mean the importance of Autobots and Decepticons, not calculus) but we are keenly aware that if we push too hard we and our precious personal culture will become enemy #1.

Somehow we must come across as unworthy and aware.