You ever hear that saying about how young people think they will live forever? That they are invincible?
It's bullshit.
It may just be because I have spent the last 3.5 years hanging out with scruffy philosophy majors for my late night-conversations, but I've never known anyone my age who didn't know that they were getting older and be scared shitless by it. Actually, we all think we'll die at 30.
It's true. For the longest time, I have had the vague, unformed idea in my mind that some form of annihilation would come over me before I reached my 30th year. Or maybe not anything that dramatic, maybe it was something else that
felt like dying. It put an edge of desperation into everything I thought, if not everything I did--I wasn't sure what the hell to do half of the time. I never really talked to anyone about it, because a part of me felt it was stupid. Just my own private not-quite quarter-life crisis which could never be resolved.
I don't feel like this any more. But lately I've been talking to the Hipster Feedee (more about him later) and he talks about how he does all he can to "fake it" now. To make it seem like he's 29 or younger. About how he had a star-studded birthday so that if anyone looked him up on the internet they wouldn't see his true age right away. He tells me stories about people who write about music and art getting fired when they reach a certain age and then I get riled up and angry. No one knows why me and my peers have to think like this.
Well, Ok,
I,
personally, don't know. I just know that up until recently when I contemplated reaching that age my mind would reach such a wall of shining nothingness that I was sure it could only be The End of All Things. Maybe it's because I know deep down that Napoleon and Alexander the Great and Mozart all did their thing by 20 or so.
Really, I was a failure out of the womb.
When I make a little more effort to imagine it, I think we're all more afraid of our sprits dying than our bodies. At 30 we imagine we will all be old and fat* and boring. No more parties. No more drinking. No more late nights at Kino 41st street when some stranger would put their hand in my twat**. At 30 all would magically dissolve and I would be left entirely alone in a dead end job, maybe at Starbucks.
A young gay man I know is also depressed at getting older. According to him, a 30 year old gay man is practically at death's door. A minute after midnight on his last day at 29 he will wither, turn grey, and start looking at twinkies that are hardly in their teens with the sick smile of a pedophile. (Come to think of it, wasn't this whole concept a major plot point in
Queer As Folk, how Brian Kinney was terrified of hitting 30?)
However, I now find myself almost unique among my generation in that I am not afraid of getting older. And I owe it all to reading sex blogs.
It's true. All the best sex blogs are written by old people***. According to my favorites--the ones I first found almost a year ago and kept reading up until this very day--us 20 year olds know absolutely nothing about sex. We are just mouthing our "date"'s twat and fumbling at our "boyfriend"'s ball sacks. At 20 and with a fair number of partners behind me, I can still yearn for a golden age of sex--which seems to come around 40 after a divorce****. While the thought might worry some of you, I adore you people. Your exploits put my adolescent groupings to shame and I want to be just like you when I grow up.
And as for the younger bloggers--i.e., those who have actually reached 30 without keeling over at midnight on their last day as 29ers--you're just like me, only cooler. You're still drinking and
wenching pretty girls. You're still figuring out who you are and what you want. And you embrace the exploration boldly.
It would seem, then (at least out here on the fringes of sex and gender and tech and god knows what else) that
age no longer matters when you fuck. With the knowledge that I will probably still be getting tail--and lots of it--when I reach the tender age of 40, all the other problems of aging seem more manageable.
Botox?
AAG don't need no stinkin' Botox.
Really, it's wonderful. I feel like I can breathe. I feel like I can plan ahead, not just for the next ten or so years, but for the next thirty or forty. It's like being released from a beheading, only instead of running out and seeing everything with hyperkinetic joy and thankfulness I can actually slow down a little. Theoretically.
But maybe it's not just us on the insulated fringy-fringes. Maybe it's actually becoming more mainstream. Did you ever hear those stories about people getting it on in nursing homes? One of my fav stories I read in I think
Reader's Digest, about two people who met in a nursing home that would stop the elevator between floors just so they could get some necking privacy. I say good for them.
But I still see it in every day conversations: "Old people having sex, ew." And I used to think that. And sometimes I look at old people and still think that. To my eyes, people who have gotten really up there have a strange topography to their bodies. Which, unless I improve my diet, make plans to undergo several cosmetic surgeries in the coming years, and lose all the fat that some of my fans find so attractive, will probably be just like how I look someday. Hell, someday my boobs might be down to my knees.
Thinking of it that way, you can't say "ew" anymore really. Every time you say "ew", you lose a little bit of your future leeway to fuck when you too are old people. When I'm 40 I expect to be at least 1,000 times more horny than I am now and the last thing I need while making out in the park with my silver-haired beau is a bunch of young twits going "Ew, old people making out! How disgusting!"
Cee says when I'm sixty I'm probably going to be an old pervy lady with a boy toy, but we'll ignore that part. Hell, maybe by that age I will have gotten brave enough to finally buy a vibrator.
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*not even the sexy fat that happens in Feederism. In 30-year-old life projections that never happens.
**This really happened, folks. If enough people make inquiries I might even trot down memory lane to post about it.
***Dear everyone who finds this through their blog stats that is incensed at the use of the word "old people": By "old", I mean only "older than I am". Which really isn't very, because I am in my very early 20s. I just think it's fun to poke fun at you because I can. ;)
****
It's a trend I see! You can't deny it!