We went to a show Friday night, Toad the Wet Sprocket, a band from the 90's, the decade too nostalgic to kill held us tight in it’s embrace. Me the only man standing in a sea of gray hair.
For all it's bravado, Gen X is no longer the generation that brought stage diving to an art form. Arthritic knees, grumpiness for having to move when some walked down the row, and sitting through a show ruled supreme. I refuse to comply with this and wondered to myself if since everyone was sitting, could I just walk to the front of the stage and act like we should all be acting? That we were lucky to be here. That we had the opportunity to embrace the fact that the decades that formed us didn’t break us, but were being celebrated.
These small offenses aside, what actually got me pissed were the folks so bored with an event they paid $50-100 a seat for, scrolling through the evening, a band still in peak form some 50 feet away. I get it, “Ye among us in glass houses…” and all, but we are the generation that fusses at “kids these days with their snap tok and tik chat, they need to get out and live for real!”, while looking online in real time at the setlist to a previous show to see if they’d play “Is it For Me?”
They didn’t.
No amount of IG chasing would change that.
They were spectacular otherwise.
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More than ever I bounce between thinking, “I need a new phone.” and throwing the one I have in the river. If it weren’t for listening to music and the need for others to get in touch with me, I think I would have already. I am a slave to it. Yet I hold the keys to those shackles.
It does feel like you’d miss out on something, the world so shifted to smartphones that it seems like if you jumped ship, you’d spend your days adrift and uninformed on everything. I mean, Ethel Cain and Lana Del Ray are beefing! I can’t not know.
I entertained an ever so brief hope that Generation X could be the ones to help break these chains, we of the “don’t come home until it’s dark.” and our constant bragging of “drinking water out the hose” as if we were some starved race of hunter gatherers who’d endured a trek across suburbia and made due without food or water for forty days.
We are no different. We just sit squarely in a state of snark disbelief that Boomers and Gen Z are so addicted to the technology. We who lived through every single technology’s introduction, our brains sure to rot from, in no order of significance, TV, gangsta rap, video games, the internet, social media, grunge, tattoos, piercings, computers. Too much was never enough! I can’t tell if we ever stood a chance or if we might just be able to stand up and make a change, the ”Back in my day’s.” echoing through the halls.
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I am them. I wake up and in sharp succession and nearly predictable order open my phone and go to the New York Times. I do the Wordle, attempt the Connections, and finish the Mini all within 5 mins of arising. I visit the NY Times and scan the headlines for todays version of garbage, then visit ESPN.com to see who blew out an ACL etc. I visit FB, and Instagram, wonder how people have time to constantly video and create videos of everything. I open my emails, deleting mostly all of it and check to see if someone texted me after I went to sleep.
I drink coffee and dick around on my phone wondering what the day holds for me. Anxiety and wonder, equal in their grasp, escalating by the minutes.
I wonder again and again.
Something is happening,
Is it for me?
Is it for me?
I literally cackled when I read “Snap Tik and Chat Tok”
Also, never heard of this band but enjoyed the song you posted. Adding it to my playlist!
So good Pat. I talk big all the time about how I’m going to go back to a flip phone, to break some of those shackles. My wife just laughs at me.