"Getting Myself Worked Up"

This February, I turned 63. I am not happy about it. Notice how I didn't write "celebrate turning 63." I feel like I am am being dragged into this kicking and screaming. One moment I'm 19 and listening to the Jefferson Airplane, and the next, I am noticing how I am rapidly turning into my father with bags under my eyes and the beginning of liver spots on my hands.

They used to be considered freckles.

Nonetheless, over the past year or so, I have been very conscious of my age and the approach of all "the forlorn rags of growing old," as Kerouac says in the moving last paragraph of "On the Road." These rags may be coming fast or they may arrive slowly and in stages, but I know they are out there, lurking around the lamp posts, laying in puddles, waiting in the clouds ready to pounce, sneaking in my closet and
changing my clothes to cardigan sweaters and track pants. They want to soften my bones and harden my head, to make teeth and nouns and verbs fall out, bouncing on the bathroom tiles, the same bathroom where bright red blood drains down the sink hole when I brush my teeth.

I remember, in my late teenage years, reading Eliot's poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and thinking how sad and pathetic it must be to grow old. I formulated a plan - I would put a gun to my head when I turned 50. Simple, eh? After all, it would be a whole new millennium and who would want to live that long? At the time, it seemed so far away and foreign, a slow-moving freight headed my way but so far off in the distance, it was meaningless. Needless to say, I have changed my mind around that very stupid idea.

Time back then felt so limitless. I was invincible. I was part of the "youth culture," the pampered baby boomers, taking risks and dancing with the music in the air. Those were indeed heady days. In spite of never quite surrendering myself completely to the times, I thought I was a hippie, a part of "the counter-culture" we arrogantly called it. We were "clean, immaculate" - masters of our own destiny. Everything seemed like a new  discovery as if we were psycho-nauts, pioneers in the wilderness, headed off in directions few had been before - innerspace, the final frontier. Donning bell-bottom pants and love-beads and using drugs and sitting around shabby rooms listening to music while incense sticks smoulder away on tables made from giant cable spools and - voila - we were young and alive and nothing could touch us.

I was 13 when John F. Kennedy was shot and 14 when the Beatles were on the Ed Sullivan Show. I had always been what was then called a "non-conformist." I had always felt like an alien. Growing up in Regent Park, I was a fat kid who didn't like to play sports, read poetry, wore glasses, was unbearably shy around girls. It was as if I had a tattoo of the word "different" across my forehead. I never felt like I was connecting with things around me. I remember reading Ray Bradbury's novel,  Fahrenheit 451 that year and the front of the book had an epigram from Juan Ramon Jimenez - "If they give you ruled paper, write the other way." These words struck deep into me. Jimenez's words gave me a mandate. Instead of feeling different, I made it a life-calling to be different. The other kids I hung out with liked rock 'n roll music - I went to hootenannies, wearing a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, smoking a pipe. Folk music was hippier than Lesley Gore. Fabian or Bob Dylan? Beach movies or Bergman? American Bandstand or Playhouse 90? What choice did I have? I regaled in being considered odd. It was my identity and I don't begrudge it for one moment. I was such a pretentious little shit, but the feeling of superiority helped me survive and gave me a currency, an edge, being different as a way to be normal.

Lately, the memories of those days are washing against the shores of my "deep" maturity. Teaching a History of Pop Music class at George Brown College places me in the position of  presenting my memories as history. There is an odd oscillation in that. I move between a space that is apart from me to a space that is a part of me and then back again.This week in class, for instance, we looked at the early 60s - Motown, Beatles, British Invasion, Dylan and the Greenwich Village folk boom, the Memphis Sound, even Patsy Cline. I felt this eerie feeling come over me. It was as if I was watching myself give a lecture and underneath that image was me sitting in Riverdale Park listening to The Dirty Shames or sitting on our living room couch and turning on The Lloyd Thaxton Show or my heart thumping seeing Kathy Taggart in an Empire dress, her hair in a beehive. I became very animated and, after class, one of the students came up to me and thanked me for being so passionate about the music. How could I not be? I felt so young. On the flip side, in another class, one young woman student asked who Frank Sinatra was and if he was famous. I felt so old.

My intention for this blog is to delve into these very mixed feelings I have about getting older, about bouncing off memory, about struggling with the Brad that inside me and the way Brad must look like from the outside.
Doing this examination in the blogosphere is, perhaps, a way of finding out if these feelings are common to other old farts or just mine alone.

More shall be revealed. . .

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