Changing Times

Update: 1-22-09

Fuck you. It's Jey again. My bout with temporary sanity is over.


I was born Tuesday, August 28, 1973.

I only know it was a Tuesday because I looked it up, and I only know the date because I have an aged-yellow, torn and taped piece of paper in my possession with that exact date printed on it - August 28, 1973. It has mine and my parent's names on it, too, but I don't really need the birth certificate for that information. The names have been repeated hundreds of thousands of countless times, so they're pretty much seared into my memory, thus somehow becoming the simplest definition of my identity. I've never liked the name that much, so I informally change it every so often to something that more closely matches the correct definition of my identity. Today, it's "Jey." Tomorrow . . .

It's Wednesday, August 27, 2008.

Today I am 34, and tomorrow I will be 35. I'm aware that it's just one more second in a succession of seconds that culminate into hours and days and months, but the revolution of the odometer ticks alarmingly loudly when the smaller year gives way to the larger year. (This effect is well-represented in American cinema, as we often hear the cocking of a pistol behind the bad guy's head as he is about to commit an act that is mostly out of the audience's favor, or when the good guy is about to save the damsel in distress just before the showdown scene.)

It's loud, and it tells us that the situation as we know it has just changed, whether we're 20 going on 21 or 59 going on 60, we hear that tick get louder and louder as we go.

I noticed that succeeding generations redefine adulthood based on this uptick in age, usually due to the loss of some kind of innocence everyone seemed to share at the time, and the misguided attempt at preserving that innocence for future generations.

World War II defined adulthood absolutely for Western civilization, as wars often do. Young people, who had survived the Great Depression, wanted to help the cause. After all, they were old enough to find work when their parents couldn't, so they were old enough to fight for their countries. But the previous generation declared them too young, and 18 became the age of adulthood. Still, a young soldier sees death first hand, and he loses his innocence. A boy off to war, and man home from war. The age of 18 was it.

That attitude lasted for about twenty years before these kids figured that going to school and learning something might be a more palatable option to certain, agonizing death. Many of these 18 year old men and women with the financial means began saying "Fuck this!" and headed to college. They decided that the only way to preserve their innocence was to abandon it maturely and responsibly, using their brains rather than blood to shed the illusions of childhood, and ease their way into adulthood. To the previous generation, this act of rebellion was typical of children, and they redefined adulthood at 21.

When these kids got to the "real world," many of them realized that everything they learned wasn't going to do them a damn bit of good, and that piece of sheepskin would be better served as contraception (which actually happened, and the Baby Boom's first contribution to the grand sociological structure was the infamous "baby bust" generation of the late 60s and early 70s). The illusion of life shattered, innocence lost. Again.

I was born Tuesday, August 28, 1973.

Generation X. Stuck between a generation of thinkers who found no answers and a generation of non-thinkers who have all the answers. A generation with no inherent identity - no defining moment of change that separates who we were and who we will be. I grew up on M*A*S*H, so I know that war is bad. I grew up on Happy Days, so I know that family is good. I grew up on Saturday morning cartoons, so I know that anything is possible.

My generation's identity is a by-product of being the first generation to grow up in broken homes with television babysitters in a constant state of fear of attack by an unknown enemy. We had a choice. Don't go to war or don't go to school. (For the record, many of us did both anyway, and returned with the same information that our parents and grandparents had already found.) We sat in front of the tube our whole lives, and it became our substitute for school, play, parenting, critical thinking . . .

We grew up more slowly, yet retained the youthful spirit of independence. We had no focus, no identity, and that is seen as child-like. So somewhere between MTV and Thirtysomething, someone somehow decided for us that adulthood begins at 30.

Notice the pattern here. Old says, "too young," young says, "old enough," and the whole process becomes progressively slower. Then some brown people flew some planes into some buildings, and the next generation got its defining moment. World War II, Vietnam, World Trade Center -- mine is the only generation of the last century not to have been forced into adulthood. Society, for us, skipped a beat. It's gotten to the point where 12 year-olds are left to make adult decisions, even though they have no fucking clue what to do (at least my generation can claim self-awareness to this cluelessness).

It's Wednesday, August 27, 2008.

By any definition, 35 years is plenty of time to reach a point of understanding of the world (sophistication) as yet unmatched by younger generations. I could even become president now. (Me!) Today I'm too young, but tomorrow I'll be old enough. Whatever defines me today surely can't define me tomorrow. So today it's "Jey." Tomorrow . . .

Update: 8-29-08

. . . it's Joe.