46

I turn 46 years old today, far enough into my 40s that I cannot deny that 50 is looming. This birthday I feel oddly at peace with that fact. It's taken me this long into my 40s to get comfortable with the reality that I have more yesterdays than tomorrows and that each day another door of possibility closes. These are difficult thoughts to sit with, and I have seen them cause a great deal of emotional distress. When you're young it feels like doors of possibility are constantly opening up, to lose that and live the opposite feels horribly cruel.

A few years ago I started to notice the unnamed problems of middle age. It's considered cringe and lame for middle-aged people to talk about the discontents of this life transition, so we rarely do. This only makes the problems worse. Imagine if we just ignored the emotional difficulties of adolescence? Middle age is just as trying to the soul, but in a different register. I have witnessed many people become bitter to the point that other people don't want to associate with them. I have seen others wall themselves off and give up on living. Others still descend into addiction. 

The statistics show the toll. Even before COVID life expectancy was going down on America due to the opioid epidemic and increase in suicides and alcoholism. The main danger zone was among the middle aged, especially white working class women. 

You go through your youth dreaming of the future, once you hit a certain age you realize that your present in going to be your future, every damn day until your looming demise. If, like a lot of working people, you spend your days doing shitty menial work for low pay and benefits and no financial security and your body is breaking down due to that work that fails to provide you a decent livelihood it's no wonder people turn to drink, the needle, or kill themselves. Even those who are more well-off must face the dread that they are not going to be able to break out of the rut they have found themselves in, albeit a comfier rut.

I've tried to not focus on the things that won't happen. I will likely never finish the book project I have been working on, for example. I will never be a respected historian. My writing will probably never reach a larger audience than this blog. That's okay. The last year and a half has been trying in the extreme, but my job is more meaningful than ever, even though it has been harder than ever. I own a house and have cleared my debts. I have a wonderful spouse and my children bring me joy even on the days that they annoy the hell out of me. As the last few years have shown, the world is unpredictable in horrific ways. Instead of being bitter about what I don't have, it's just best to enjoy what I've got.

The pandemic was also clarifying in terms of my middle-aged priorities. For instance, I got to spend a lot more time with my family, and I am glad for it. For me and a lot of other folks it seems to have pushed us to de-prioritize our jobs and careers. When death looms those PTS reports can sit for a bit. So on this birthday I'm going to take a little hike with my family and get some takeout. We'll watch a classic film I've been dying for my kids to see. What could be better?

Life's Rough Middle Patch

"Harvest Moon" is a rare positive song about middle age and appreciating what you have

Last week I opined a little on Twitter on the emotional difficulties of middle age, and I think it actually lost me some followers. Twitter is a place slanted towards the young, so I should talk about my middle-aged angst on a blog, which is a fittingly unfashionable platform for an unfashionable topic.

I've been reading a lot recently about "deaths of despair" from suicide, alcohol-related illnesses, and drug overdoses, and how they have been spiking among the middle-aged. This full blown national midlife crisis is getting surprisingly little attention despite the fact that it has dragged down the nation's life expectancy. There are deeper causes behind this, but there's also a reason why this is manifesting among those in middle age.

It's the stage of life that's perhaps the most emotionally fraught, even more than adolescence. Once you hit middle age you suddenly realize that you've gotten to where you are going to be. There is no bright future anymore, just the present for another few decades until you die after you've hopefully had a little time to enjoy your retirement. With each passing day, I can hear a door slam. The sense of possibility that came with youth is gone.

Once you've reached this point and become cognizant of your rut, you start to think long and hard about whether it's a good rut to be in or not. A lot of what we call a "midlife crisis" is merely people realizing the die is cast and they are deeply unhappy about having to live the second half of their lifetimes in the place where they have ended up.

It hasn't been too bad for me. Quarantine has reminded me of how lucky I am to have my wife and daughters. The way my school has handled the transition to distance learning makes me happy to work for them. The appreciations I got from graduating seniors last week reminded me that my job is one that truly makes an impact on others.

However, it's becoming more and more apparent what I am not going to have and where I have failed. Being a teacher who sacrificed prime earning years to grad school means I will never have the money to travel to a lot of the places I've dreamed about since my youth. I am probably never going to get a book published. My attempts to be an "independent scholar" after leaving academia have basically failed. Name publications don't want to publish my submissions, and never will. I haven't made many new friends where I live and it's unlikely I ever will, and will spend the rest of my life hundreds of miles from my family and closest friends.

On balance things have worked out! But that doesn't mean that certain things don't get lost to the point that they can't come back. That's the bitter truth of middle age. It's little wonder that people my age far less affluent than me are dying "deaths of despair." America is a place where it is less and less likely that people can reach middle age feeling good about where they have ended up.

Yet we lack even the most basic public conversation about this. The "midlife crisis" is a stock target of derision in our popular culture. In this youth-obsessed society discussing aging is a faux pas deserving of mockery. It's high time that we reckoned with the emotional difficulties of middle age. Maybe the beginning is for us sad sack middle-aged types to just talk about it.

On Watching Quadrophenia in Middle Age

This year I have made a point of listening to as much new music as possible. Now that I've hit middle age I am shocked by how backwards-looking people my age can be. I hear their fear and derision towards a changing world and pray that does not become me. It has become increasingly clear to me that indulging in the comforts of nostalgia in middle age too often is a soul killer.

Despite my resolution to stick to new stuff, I ended up rewatching the 1979 film Quadrophenia this weekend. It's based on the 1973 concept album by The Who of the same name, but without being a rock opera. The Who's music is always in the background, the main characters don't break into song, other than to hum or sing their favorite pop songs to themselves. (One of the best scenes involves two characters singing rival kinds of music in adjoining public bathtubs.)

The story is set around Jimmy, a young working class man engaging in the "mod" subculture of mid-1960s London. Jimmy and his mod friends often tangle with "rockers" from the same working class neighborhoods. The mods wear smart suits, ride scooters with lots of mirrors, and listen to British rock bands like Kinks, Who, and Small Faces. The rockers prefer motorcycles, black leather, and American rockabilly like Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran.

Jimmy finds himself in a personal crisis. He works a crummy office job (that he eventually loses) while living at home and clashing with his parents, who disapprove of his lifestyle. He strikes out hard in love and alienates his friends. It's implied that he's suffering from mental illness, but isn't getting treatment for it. (In the album he is, but the film is far bleaker.) Perhaps worst for him, a mail truck destroys his scooter.

The mods and rockers tangled on the beaches of Brighton, and the film ends with Jimmy going there, trying to relive one glorious weekend where he led his friends into battle and won the affection of his crush. He discovers that the "ace face," the coolest of the mods (played memorably by Sting) is actually just a bell boy. Jimmy steals the bell boy's scooter and drives it to the white cliffs over the beach. Watching it you fear that Jimmy is going to kill himself, but since the film opens with him walking away from the cliff at sunset, you know that he doesn't. (Although some people seem to miss this.)

Instead, he sends the scooter, the symbol of his allegiance to the mod life, over the side of the cliff. The shot of it crashing on the rocks freezing into a still photo as Roger Daltry sings the line "You stop dancing" is one of my favorite final shots ever. It hits like a punch to the head, especially after the beautiful, sweeping footage of the cliffs. The whole mod thing, which promised liberation, was just a dead end trap, and Jimmy has rejected it.

It's a scene that hit me hard in my 20s, when I like Jimmy was still trying to define myself. In middle age it hit harder, but for different reasons. By the time one reaches 40 plenty of compromises have been made and beloved things left behind. At some point you have to recognize that you are no longer young, and that the aging people around you who insist on being young look absolutely pathetic.

Seeing that scooter go off of the cliff was a reminder of what I've had to quit. First and foremost I quit academia, which ended up being as imprisoning as mod life, even if I was decked out in boxy tweed instead of the slim threads of Swinging London. So much of what we put our hopes and dreams into ends up going wrong, it seems.

But beyond that dramatic life change, getting old means losing people. They got lost to death, to distance, to drifting and sometimes in explosions of anger and recrimination. I think back to my two years in Chicago and how one of my closest friends from then is dead and the other is estranged from me. Places get lost, too. When I go back to my hometown I don't usually recognize too many people. Most of my old haunts in the town where I went to grad school are shuttered now.

As I said, however, nostalgia is a bad disease in middle age. Instead of looking back, it's best to see forward. I don't go to rock shows much anymore, but I do have fun doing impromptu dance parties with my daughters, for instance. The possible onset of a pandemic had me soul searching a lot recently, and I realized that even though I never managed to be a respected professor or writer, I'm happier than I thought I'd ever be back in my young confused days, and that's all I really need.

"Southern Cross" (Track of the Week)

I am a big believer in the notion that there is no such thing as a guilty pleasure, at least how the category is usually constructed. We like what we like, and should never feel bad for what we like not being hip enough. I think, however, that one can feel embarrassed. I call such things "sheepish pleasures."

One of my sheepiest pleasures is the song "Southern Cross" by Crosby, Stills, and Nash. Not only are they the avatars of the Boomers turning the 60s into a lifestyle brand, this song comes from the early 80s, well after their hour had passed. Back in the 90s the underrated Request magazine had a "Geezer" category in its reviews section exactly for stuff like this. It was all treated as a kind of joke, the lamest of lame music.

Despite that stigma, I think "Southern Cross" is my favorite CSN song (when you add the Y that's another story.) Age has weathered the group's voices a little, giving their famous harmonies a little something deeper in their sound. It's also not just hippy dippy stuff in the lyrics, either. It's a song about sailing as a metaphor for searching, of hitting some rough seas in your life and getting out of it and being reading to go to new horizons.

I love this theme because it is so transparently about *gulp* middle age. In my youth I disdained this music for that very reason, but now it resonates so clearly with me. I first really started appreciating this song the summer after I moved from Texas to New Jersey to start my new life post-academia. I had survived some stormy oceans and almost got shipwrecked along the way. My new lease on life felt like a miracle.

I was remembering that feeling yesterday on the commuter train ride home. It was the last day of classes for the school year, and I was feeling that usual sense of accomplishment and exhaustion. It's a sublime emotion that I never felt before I set sail from the familiar waters of my academic training into the uncharted seas of teaching high school. A new and better world was revealed to me, as foreign to the old one as the Southern Cross for a sailor who had never crossed the equator before. I'm so glad I made that journey.

Avoiding the Middle Age Bitterness Trap

I'm getting through middle age by tapping into my inner Peter Falk

Hitting 40 did not seem like much of a milestone, but age 43 has suddenly brought all the middle-aged thoughts I thought were coming three years ago. They aren't all necessarily bad. I think all the time about how I've done a lot in my life, and that what I do for a living has had a positive impact on the world. I'm okay not being young anymore. The bad thoughts are the morbid ones, of course. At this point it's very likely that I have more yesterdays than tomorrows. The problem with having gained a renewed will to live in the past eight years is that death scares me a lot more than it used to. In my younger days I was pretty ambivalent about living. I have learned to enjoy life more fully and now I desperately don't want to have to give it up. Sometimes on my morning commute I hope that when I eventually go I'm more prepared for it.

At the same time, watching other middle-aged people around me has made me hyper-aware of the traps of middle age. The two big ones are bitterness and resentment, which usually come together. Middle age is when you have the harrowing realization that you have become what you are. In youth you tend to think of yourself becoming something, there is still room for self-invention, and still room to think that your faults will eventually fade. If you don't "make it" in your chosen field by your 40s, well, you're never going to make it. That can be a spur for bitterness and resentment.

For the vast the majority of us never achieve the things we dream, and our consumerist society is constantly pushing us to "dream big," which usually means a big disappointment. In that respect I am glad that I left academia at the age of 35, when I was still young enough to reinvent myself and recover from the mental blow that transition made. If I did so at 40 I wonder if I would feel so good about myself right now.

I have seen so many people succumb to bitterness and resentment in middle age, their souls wilted and withered. This form of self hate always ends up getting projected onto other people. It closes minds and closes hearts and deafens ears to the sufferings of others. Those who are frustrated at their position and feel let down by life inevitably derive satisfaction from seeing other people brought down to their level. If the people around them are not as miserable as they are, they will make it so. These are the poisonous gossips at work, the family members who engage in belittling behaviors, the tyrannical boss who goes out of their way to always make you feel small. 

What's especially frightening to me is that this form of middle aged dysfunction has been weaponized for political use. White men in their 50s were Trump's most loyal bloc, the group most likely to be resentful about their lives. Those emotions can be easily turned against the "other" who is then blamed for their situation. I was just talking to a friend who said a bunch of his formerly apolitical friends (also middle aged) suddenly became vocal Trump supporters. It makes sense to me, considering the appeals he makes to resentment and those most receptive to it.

So every day I tell myself not to succumb, and to try to throw a lifeline to the people I see drowning in an all-consuming bitterness. Sure I never became a tenured professor or published a book, but there are things in life a lot more important than that. 

Slacking As Refusal? (A Gen Xer Reflects)

In my head this is still current and nothing you say will convince me otherwise

Generational analysis has become a popular pastime among the chattering and twittering classes. This has brought the sad conjunction of the words "aging" and "Gen X." While I have been fine dealing with my own aging, it's been tough realizing that my generation's cultural touchstones and values are being met with derision by those younger than me. For example, I recently heard something criticized as being made for "Gen X ironists" and that smarted a little. I was reared by the culture of the nineties to deride selling out and think most pop music was shit, but now people younger than me think that's politically regressive or something because the masses are always right, even when they like mass produced shit. 

But hey, that's just part of getting old and I should learn to deal with it. I do not want to be like the boomers who act as if the sixties were the paragon of human experience and will tell you about it at every single opportunity. If I am honest with myself I know how angry and irritated I got at my own generation when it was in its youth. At my college there was pretty much zero political activity. My third year I started a club with some of my friends to push for progressive causes on campus. We weren't very big.

My friends and I were complete exceptions to the rule of apathy that reigned among white middle class young people like ourselves. (When doing any generational analysis these kinds of qualifiers are absolutely necessary.) Reagan was elected when we were in preschool, and by the time we had graduated from high school the neoliberal onslaught was pretty much complete. When I was in college a Democrat was president who exulted that the "era of big government is over" while he went after welfare recipients with the same gusto as the Gipper. There was, in the words of Margaret Thatcher, No Alternative. 

For people from my background, there were basically two alternatives. Alternative number one was to embrace the new order and take it to the hilt. When I see people like Paul Ryan and Scott Walker my skin crawls because I knew a lot of guys of their exact type in college. They had absolute faith that their position in society was all due to their hard work, and were completely uninterested in expressing any kind of empathy for those who had it worse than them. These were the people who aspired to live in the McMansions sprouting in 1990s suburbia like mushrooms. I met these guys again a couple of years ago when I was at a birthday party for one of my daughter's friends in a much more suburban town than the one I live in. A couple of the dads at this event were practically spitting with anger about Colin Kaepernick. 

The other option was to refuse to take part in the new culture of greed and consumerism. When reading my Twitter buddy Jon Malesic's piece "Millennials Don't Have A Monopoly On Burnout" I suddenly realized that the "slacking" that a lot of folks were doing back in the 90s wasn't laziness, it was refusal. Modern American capitalism is built to suck its workers dry, chew them up, and spit them out. It's perfectly sensible to sit that shit out. Of course, that kind of thinking doesn't lead to much social change, and it may even be self-defeating.

At the same time, I have to remind myself to take pride in having opted in my twenties not to join the Paul Ryans of the world. I (stupidly?) decided to go to grad school and pursue the life of the mind. Little did I know that the neoliberal tide would soon submerge higher education, too. But you know what? I was broke in my 20s, but I had a blast. I worked like a madman in grad school, but it was work that MEANT SOMETHING to me. When I left academia I became a teacher, a job that is hard but fills me with joy on a regular basis. To get that job I had to quit being a professor, the much higher status job. I'd been lucky enough to learn that refusal can be liberating.

Whenever I think about how much less money I have because of these life decisions and get a little sad about it, I remind myself that I've spent my adult life doing work meant to do something positive in this awful, broken, capitalist hellscape. I am glad I came of age at a time when I got the validation to take that path. My generation maybe isn't much to write home about, but maybe we can pass along the wisdom that opting out of our contemporary world of "personal branding" and endless self-promotion isn't such a terrible idea.

Old Dad's Records (The 1975 Episode)

The newest episode of my podcast Old Dad's Records is up this week. Since yesterday was my birthday, I talk about the year I was born: 1975. I start with the Isley Brothers' "Fight The Power," which I consider to be one of the last gasps of the long 1960s. After that I dig into the Bee Gees' Main Course album, which was on the charts the month I was born. That record was a transitional one, just the like the era that produced it. I finish by lauding the most recent Guided By Voices record, proof positive that aging doesn't have to suck.

Looking At 42

My birthday was last week, on Labor Day. I've now hit 42, which is a good number. It reminds me of Jackie Robinson and The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. I refuse to let myself be sucked in by our culture's obsession with youth and fear of aging. Sometime in the past year I realized that, for the first time in my life, I am at peace with the knowledge of my inevitable death. Perhaps it's because I felt like I've finally accomplished enough to feel like I have not wasted my shot. I certainly didn't feel that way at 32.

At the same time, I have realized that I have changed in ways that are not all that great. In recent years I feel that I've regressed and become a much less good-natured person. In my teens and early twenties I was angry a lot, with a big chip on my shoulder. This was mostly due to emerging out of years of bullying at school, which inflamed feelings of contempt for other people and my surroundings. To protect myself from constantly being told that I was ugly and weak I told myself that I was better than the people around me. I carried this attitude with me to college, but getting social acceptance there helped wear it down. This process continued in graduate school (compounded by the humbling experience of my master's program), and by the time I hit 30 my friends would actually characterize me as "laid back" and "easy going." Nobody who knew me at age 17 would have said such a thing.

It was after getting my PhD that things changed again. Two years of being exploited in a low-paid "visiting professor" position and three years on the tenure track where I again had to face the kind of bullying that I thought I had escaped in my youth had some bad effects on me. I have become much more attuned to perceived slights, and to people condescending to me or trying to take advantage of me. I vowed after that to never again be a pushover and to always hit back twice as hard when someone came at me. Now I get mad. A lot. For awhile I thought that I had attained a healthy assertiveness that I had once lacked and whose absence had allowed other people to hurt me. Now it seems that I am in danger of becoming a bitter, angry person, the kind of middle-aged I guy I used to look at with a shudder.

Part of the issue is that as a teacher and a parent and a spouse, I have to expend vast amounts of patience on a daily basis, and I am finding all too often that when I get home from work, my reservoirs have been exhausted. I've resolved to try to fix this.

The inspiration came from thinking about some of the people I have been lucky to know in my life. I know people who have been through worse than me who are still the kind people they always were. They are the kind of people who never say anything bad about another person, who respond to challenges with patience. They are people are who are always able to maintain perspective about the problems in their lives. I need to remember their example.

If middle age has taught me anything so far, it's that the doors of possibility close with each passing day. Instead of thinking about the person I am going to be, which is what consumed my youth, I AM that person, and either have to be at peace with that, or think about how I can be better.

Yacht Rock And Middle Age Softening

My favorite Yacht Rock episode: Steely Dan vs. The Eagles

I turned 40 last September, but it's only been in the last couple of months that middle age has seemed real. Aches and pains don't leave me, but set up shop like unwelcome squatters in my body. Every few days my right ankle feels like somebody whacked it with an aluminum bat. I don't even remember what minor injury brought this on, but the pain isn't going away. My knees creak and crackle when I sit down, my back is as stiff as Al Gore when I wake up in the morning. I still exercise and eat reasonably well, but those habits don't seem to be working as well at holding off my thickening midsection as they used to.

What I am noticing even more than my softening belly are my softening tastes. Yeah sure every now and then I want to put "Loose" by the Stooges on the hi-fi an let 'er rip, but I am just as likely to want to put "Right Down The Line" by Gerry Rafferty on the turntable. My activities this holiday weekend are a good example of my middle aged softening. On Memorial Sunday I had about an hour of time to myself while my daughters were upstairs failing to take a nap. (I tried, I really did.) I spent it sitting out on my screened-in back porch, drinking coffee and reading while listening to a genre of music known as Yacht Rock. (More on that in a bit)

There was a time not long ago when my Memorial Day weekends were very different. I remember traveling to Atlanta or Michigan to meet up with old friends while draining pints, growlers, and sixers of the finest brew. Before that, in grad school, it was three days of the same, just with more people and less travel. Things have changed, obviously, especially the music.

I was first introduced to the concept of Yacht Rock about a decade ago through the great and eponymous web series. (The guys from it now have their own music podcast, well worth checking out.) Yacht Rock is best described as the smooth LA rock music of the late 70s and early 80s best embodied by Kenny Loggins, Michael McDonald, Hall and Oates, Steely Dan, and Toto. I knew the music already, I just hadn't really conceptualized it yet. The show made me laugh, mostly because of how seriously it took this music, which I thought (Steely Dan apart) was irredeemably middle of the road and cheesy.

Somewhere, somehow along the line I actually started listening to the music for its own sake, and even enjoying it.  While the likes of 10cc, Gerry Rafferty, Fleetwood Mac, and songs such as Player's "Baby Come Back" aren't Yacht Rock by the narrow definition offered by JD Ryznar and the other creators of the show,* I added them to my rotation, too. I chalk it all up to my middle-age softening. At this point I am going to give myself over to it and stop fighting it, since there's nothing more pathetic than an old person trying to be young.

With all that in mind, here's my top five list of Yacht Rock songs (narrowly defined):

5. The Doobie Brothers "What A Fool Believes"

Here's the song that kicked off the Yacht Rock web series, and with good reason. The Doobies were yer typical 70s blues rockers, with a few hits to their name. In the late 70s they sold their souls to the Yacht Rock devil, going high on the charts by sanding the sharp corners and replacing their bluesy funk with something folks call "the Doobie bounce." Michael McDonald's otherworldly voice when he sings "Wise man has the power" launched a thousand yacht rock songs.

4. Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald "This Is It"

Now here's some smooth music with a little bite. It starts with Kenny and Michael, the two towering figures of Yacht Rock, singing all soft and coy, but then Kenny lets loose with some spunky emoting while Michael McDonald blasts forth with his tell-tale voice that "this is it!" How could you not believe him? This is possibly the smoothest song about fighting ever written.

3. Michael Jackson "Human Nature"

Few people know this, but Toto is ALL OVER Michael Jackson's Thriller album. Eddie Van Halen famously plays the solo on "Beat It," but it's Steve Lukather with the kickin' guitar riff that drives the song. On "Human Nature," however, the music is as smooth as the water of a placid cove. The gloved one singing on the bridge combined with the crystaline synth is awful dang pretty, like a sailboat on the blue horizon.

2. Michael McDonald "I Keep Forgetting"

This is probably the only Yacht Rock song to give birth to a gangta rap classic. ("Regulate" by Warren G and Nate Dogg.) McDonald was the king of Yacht Rock, lending his lead vocals to the Doobie Brothers and his backing vocals to just about everyone else, from Steely Dan to Christopher Cross. (His ubiquity gave rise to a classic SCTV sketch.) In the 80s he had a chance to show off his talents as a solo artist, and this song does not disappoint. His, shall we say, "unique" voice has the perfect bed of spooky electric piano and busy eletrobass to rest on here.

1. Steely Dan "Deacon Blues"

Let's get a little meta, shall we? Here is a Yacht Rock song about, of all things, being old. Steely Dan was my Yacht Rock gateway drug, I started digging them after a friend made me a mix tape (remember those?) with some Dan deep cuts on it. While the first Steely Dan records were not completely smooth, 1977's Aja was as smooth as Cary Grant in Charade. "Deacon Blues" is sung from the perspective of an aging jazz musician, one know living on the "suburban streets," never having found fame, but still playing his music. It contains some of Donald Fagen's best lines, from "I cried when I wrote this song/ Sue me if I play too long" to "They've got a name for the winners in the world/ I want a name when I lose/ They call Alabama the Crimson Tide/ Call me Deacon Blues." It's a song about sticking to your guns and being yourself, but from the perspective of wise middle age rather than callow youth. For that reason I love it.

*They see Yacht Rock as something very specific, more scene-related than sound related. The same studio musicians played on the narrowly-defined Yacht Rock stuff, and it had a heavy jazz influence