Thursday, June 15, 2006

There. Are. FOUR. LIGHTS!

I've come to the realization - gradually, creepingly, over the course of untold days and weeks and months - that I am no longer part of the coveted young person demographic. I am 31, married with a kid and another on the way, steadily employed, working in an office environment, and my average bedtime now hovers around 10:30pm - no surprise, then, that I have fallen out of this coveted social and cultural cluster. For fuck's sake, one beer of a Friday night and I'm ready for a solid eight hours. Of blissful sleep.

But I still didn't think of myself as a grownup. Not really. Intellectually, I knew that my irresponsible years were behind me; emotionally, I still thought of myself as 23. Shudder-inducing though that statement may be, it is truth. I had constructed an elaborate illusion of myself in my head, for the sole benefit of my own ... what? Self-preservation? Self-worth? Internal hipster cred? Who knows.

Last night, as I was drifting to sleep next to my wife after about a (highly-satisfying) hour of NBA Street Vol. 3 on the old PS2, this artifice was shattered. For some reason, my mind wandered onto the subject of emo, and I realized that, no matter how many times I hear the fucking term and the stupid fucking music it refers to, the first thing that will pop into my head when I hear the word is this:

Emo Philips.

Dear God, he's not even funny.

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