Watch the history books get thicker
happy birthday to me
If it happens to be your birthday …
and you happen to be almost 40 …
and the weirdos in your Instagram DMs have started calling you a MILF …
I highly suggest you listen to the best birthday song of all time, “Forever Young” by Sparks.
“I’ll sit and watch the history books get thicker,” Russel Mael sings. “You say I’m playing god but you’re old and wasted.” Which I love because, well yeah, if you were forever young, you would be watching time accumulate incrementally in the length of history books. That would be the scale of time’s passage—from a distance, every major event would be a single line.
It even has one of my personal favorite elements of any song: the bridge where the singer drops the melody to intone from the pulpit, like a motivational speaker or a football coach or a televangelist, “I don’t care what you do, babe. But as for me I’m not gonna change, not one bit. I’m not getting older or grayer or fatter or slower, nuh uh!”
And that is how I feel. Today I am 39. I still think of “middle-aged women” as people who aren’t me, people like wine moms, I guess, who have weird word signs (EAT! FAMILY!) in their suburban houses, people who are sentimental and culturally regressive and offended. But someone recently pointed out to me that technically, middle-aged c’est moi, and they were right.
The strange thing about getting old is that everybody seems invested in telling you that it’s not happening. As if “getting old” is a destination with a particular threshold rather than a process which has been constant all this time.
If I ever mention “getting old” in proximity to myself conversationally, I hear a lot of “No! No! You’re still young, what are you talking about?” Which is well-intentioned, I’m sure, but strange. As if I had slandered myself, when I really just mean that I am still saying “Hi, it’s Sarah” when I leave a voice message, because I grew up in the time of rotary fucking phones.
But listen, babes. I’m old enough that whole literary subcultures have blossomed and fallen apart during my adulthood and are now reincarnating themselves. (People are even talking about Tao Lin again, can you believe it?) I’m old enough that I genuinely feel sorry for people growing up right now because everything about my era was better. I’m old enough that the clothes I wore to middle school sleepovers are a thing again. I’m old enough that a show like Yellowjackets sets up a desperately unfulfilled middle-aged character with a soundtrack of songs I taped off of 104.7 the Revolution in seventh grade, using the contrast between Shauna and her current reality of endless laundry to underscore the contrast between her and her presumably once vital sense of life. I used to feel sorry for people who didn’t want to go out to the club. I always imagined that those people were being hindered by some lack of self-esteem. It never occurred to me that someone might see the idea of leaving their house after 11pm as undesirable.
Technically anyone, even the just born, are getting old. It is a process, a lengthy one, and if you want to do it, you have to start right away. In fact, if you want to get old eventually, you must start aging immediately and continue, with zero stops. But no one would ever say that a five-year-old was getting old, except as a joke, maybe because for the moment they are also busy getting many other things, like the capacity to tie shoes and a personal acquaintance with disappointment.
It is my prediction that the next major wave of subculture will be Old. It makes sense, doesn’t it? Coolness is exclusive, and old age is a club that many people never get to belong to. In spite of the fact that youth has been the framework for coolness for like, the whole of American time. Most culture and subculture right now seems like a reductive stream of stylistic signifiers pasted over a surprisingly undifferentiated misery of fragile online-ness and the symphonic exile it creates while your friend Algorithm recommends a cat toy you were subconsciously thinking of buying. Put on Jncos and a bucket hat, keep living in the metaverse. For all the alleged differences between gen Z and millennials, the fundamental fears and worldviews aren’t really that different. Shitposting and mean-mugging capitalism from your bedroom is about all there is.
And besides, anyone can be a trend forecaster: You just figure out what the culture considers the most repulsive and pathetic, and head straight for it. That’s how irony moves. But it’s also true that people have a hunger for something that feels new and rule-breaking. And what could be more rule-breaking than saying I HEART AGING & DYING? Can you feel all the anarchy in that statement?
Somehow this statement doesn’t feel like a contradiction of the Sparks song, even though it obviously is. Maybe because they share an attitude rather than a semantic logic. You’re old and wasted. I <3 aging & dying. Feels like the same thought, where you open a door in the air and pull out the truth. Maybe being forever young means living in constant agreement with aging and dying.
Anyway, I’m going to celebrate by making some guitar noise, putting on my ancient Revlon Russian Red, and not brushing my hair.
X
S
P.S. If you’d like to get me a bday gift, please make a donation to Cave Canem instead! (Unless you absolutely insist.)
P.P.S. I made a shop on Bookshop.org called Idea Funeral. You can buy all of my favorite books. These are affiliate linx, fyi.
I’m 39 and so many of my MFA classmates are in their early to mid 20s. There are 3 of us in our late 30s. I assumed the young folks would ignore us, but not so! Young people right now totally want to be friends with us middle aged motherfuckers! Which proves your point that old is the new cool.
The Sparks Brothers documentary was the best thing I watched recently. Highly recommend. Also- I think life gets better as you get older (says the woman in her early 60s). Age is really just a number.