Man-Rule: Don't Get Old

Once again, Life slaps me upside the head and says, “Did that hurt, old-timer?”

A few days ago I was talking with a friend about music. She was compiling a list of songs to put on her iPod, and she mentioned Jungle Love.

Now, I like Jungle Love. Definitely better than Space Cowboy, in my opinion. I was about to compliment her on her taste in music, when she said, “Pretty much anything by Morris Day and the Time is good, though.”

I stopped her and said, in a very patronizing voice, “Morris Day didn’t do Jungle Love. Steve Miller did that.”

And she looked confused and said, “No, Morris Day did it.”

And we went back and forth until I finally looked up the song on the Internet, and we were both right – Steve Miller recorded a song called Jungle Love in the 70s, and Morris Day recorded one in the 80s.

The thing is, I was a teenager in the 80s. I ought to remember the Morris Day version (and I did, too, once she sang a little of it, but I pretended not to remember anyway, so she started doing the bird dance that Morris Day made famous, which tickled me no end), but what automatically pops into my head when I hear the title Jungle Love is the Steve Miller version. My friend, of course, is in her 30s, so her default memory for that title is Morris Day’s song.

And so my friend said, “Man, I keep forgetting how old you are.”

I’m FORTY-SIX, dammit. I’m not old. At least, I’m not supposed to be old.

Of course, right now a lot of senior citizens are saying “You think THAT’S bad? I think of GLENN Miller when I hear the phrase ‘Jungle Love’! STEVE Miller is just a whippersnapper!” And that would be a valid point, if Glenn Miller had ever recorded a song called Jungle Love, but since he didn’t, you’re just senile and you should shut up now and get back to your busy schedule of drooling and ordering stuff off of infomercials.

How does this happen, anyway? How’d I get old? I mean, in my head, I feel like I ought to be around 25 … maybe 28, tops. How did I get to be in my 40s?

I remember a Fourth of July evening in the mid-70s, when my best friend Slade Sanders and I were throwing firecrackers at an ant mound near my driveway. I had just had a birthday, and so we were talking (in between raining down Nuclear Armageddon on the ants) about age and such. And I remember saying, “You know, when the year 2000 hits, we’ll be 34 years old. Man, that’s OLD.”

Slade agreed; he wasn’t sure we’d even be able to live that long. (Given our propensity to play with fireworks during our childhood, though, Slade was probably right to wonder about that.) At that time, 34 was, like, Methuselah-old. Older than our parents, even. If you can imagine something living that long.

So apparently I got old when I wasn’t looking. And it’s not just chronologically, either – I act a lot older than I should sometimes.

Take hairstyles. My son and stepson both like their hair to be long and shaggy. I can remember, as a teenager, wanting to grow my hair long like the cool kids did in school, and how my parents wouldn’t let me do it. Oh, how I argued about that one, to no avail. Now, 30 years later, my own kids want their hair long, and I’m on the other side of that debate. “Son, Pat Benatar didn’t have hair that long at the height of her popularity, and she is a girl” is a common phrase I say in my house, which leads to the boy(s) saying “Who’s Pat Benatar?” followed by me laying down on the couch for a while to rest, because that makes me feel old all over again.

And clothes. Sweet mother of Ralph Lauren, what are the kids WEARING these days? Shorts bagging down below their ankles, waistbands hitting right above their knees … this is what homeless people wore when I was a teenager. Young people, listen closely – your clothing styles do not look cool to someone over the age of 21. You look like you’re about to walk up to us and ask for some spare change, so you can catch a bus to Chicago to get a job (which is Homeless Person code for “I’m going to buy a bottle of ripple.”) (Do they even make ripple any more? Or is that another old-person memory I have that’s no longer relevant in today’s society?)

It’s only a matter of time before I’m sitting all day in a recliner, drooling on myself and ordering stuff off of infomercials and talking about how great Glenn Miller was.

Well, I’m going to fight it. Maybe I have to get old age-wise, but I don’t have to get old attitude-wise. I think I’m going to go look for some ant beds in the yard tonight. I’m pretty sure we still have some firecrackers left over from the last Fourth of July celebration.

Jungle love, it’s driving me mad, it’s making me cray-zeee …

(c) 2012 John Puckett