No longer the Youth Gone Wild

I am tired of hearing about this and that on talk radio so I flipped on iTunes. Normally I would educate myself with podcasts but instead rolled through my actual music. What a concept. Except my music seems stuck.

Take for instance the band Skid Row, aptly led by Sabastan Bach, who has a true 5 octave range. In his 1989 ode he sang about the Youth Gone Wild. I am afraid I was never a Youth Gone Wild. I listened to the song then. I like the song then. I listen to the song today. I like the song today.

I guess I never felt the hopelessness of youth. In 1989 I was in the Army, still hiding a tremendous head injury and trying to find myself when I barely knew myself. Thats the beauty of the infantry, there is no cognitive thinking needed, just do what your told and do it fast and do it right and you don't do push ups and can go to sleep. I have a longer post on my head injury which occured twenty years last week but..we'll see.

Back to the hopelessness of youth. I never got it. I always had purpose. If not to Continue the Mission I was given by my chain of command , it was to the higher calling of duty, honor, country and educating myself. I was a 'skull full of mush' looking to solidify.

When Fight Club came out with Brad Pitt and Ed Norton, I didn't get it. What was the whole ruckus about? It took me a long time to conceptualize the feeling of helplessness and sense of entrapment people think they have. Thats sort of the paradoxial crux of the story. The author lived in Portland at the time.

I lived up in Seattle during the grunge movement. I was a bit too young to have a life similiar to the movie Singles but I was very much in the mix. Oh the stories I could tell of parties and people I met there. But thats again...another post. But even in all that 'grunge' that Kurt Cobain emoted so famously and all the people my age copied...I never got it.

I was the guy saying, "Dude, lay off the smack. Put on some real clothes, no one takes you seriously with the long hair and flannel. Ditch the Doc Martens and aspire to more than working the mid day shift at the coffee shop. "

Maybe I never got 'it' because I got my memory back on movies starring people like Cary Grant, Mryna Loy, Jimmy Stewart and Katherine Hepburn. Movies in the 40's and 50's had guys that were cool. They were in charge with women who were in charge. They had witty reparte'.

I wanted to be cool. I wanted witty reparte'.

I guess I wanted to be a Youth Gone Wild, but didn't want the baggage. But the music is catchy so I listen to it and its tied to my formative years. But also catchy was the dialogue between Cary Grant and Shirley Temple in Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer. And I guess I would rather have myself learning more from movies in the 40's than music in the 80's.