"Got Carried Away" Trashcan Sinatras

I woke up this morning thinking I had caught the virus floating around work, a tricky sucker that slides into the body and produces few symptoms until it fully matures into a full-body cast. I couldn't get up. I was dead tired.

And then remembering that my immune system is that of a vulture's, I thought, "I couldn't be sick, so is it because I haven't been eating enough protein? Is my stomach eating up my muscles?" But I had a burger last night. "Oh, was it all the jumping and screaming, my silly reclamation of youth at last night's Green Day concert?"

And that's what it was. I am tired because that's what happens now.

"It's because he's getting old," my dad yelled from the kitchen early yesterday, as my ex-brother-in-law stopped by to pick up his kids and noticed my thinning hair.

This morning as I got my haircut I told the lady, "I usually get a 2 on the sides, but I'd like a 3 all the way around. Is 3 still good for me? I know the theory is that as you lose your hair, you're supposed to keep it short."

She said a 3 is perfect for me and then eventually it'll be a 2 and a 1 and when I'm ready, it'll be bald. "But don't worry right now, you have plenty on top. You should see the other guys who come here. You're just doing the receding thing." She traced my brow. "But it's different for men. You guys are lucky. When Bruce Willis shaved it off and was very public about it, it liberated you guys. For women it's different; we have to buy wigs."

Aging is weird because, like that virus at work, it sneaks its way into you and you don't notice it until one day you realize there's something very different about the way you feel. I enjoyed Green Day's concert not because of the music--once you hear one Green Day song, you've heard them all-- but because I was fascinated by the audience. There was a kid at his first concert and his dad explained, "We're clapping now for the encore. So they come out." And the kid clapped and stomped on the metal bench and eventually played his air-guitar and banged his head with not as much self-consciousness as when he first tried. Behind me was a very fat Mexican teenager who screamed every garbled and politically-charged lyric. Hell no, he wasn't part of a redneck agenda, or the moral majority. In fact, fuck George W. Bush. Not his president.

I thought, I was this kid for Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation tour in 1989 and the fat Mexican for Radiohead 10 years later. And there I was in between, smiling at them in recognition, as I cradled a cup of merlot with one hand and rubbed my sore right knee with the other.