By Jay Fox
Brooklyn, NY, USA
When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I
understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put
away childish things. – Saul
Paul
Feeling yourself suddenly too old to be doing
something is kind of like an out of body experience. You observe yourself in a
new light or, at the very least, in a less biased way. You find yourself
suddenly capable of removing all of those yeah’s
that you typically tell yourself or others; you stop calculating all the
conditions that you add to the equation to make what you're doing acceptable;
you look at exactly what is going on and you say to yourself, “What the fuck am
I doing right now?”
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| Jay Fox |
It's strange. It's strange because humans are
excellent liars, especially when we lie to ourselves. In fact, we are so good
that at times we don't even recognize that the narratives we've woven for
ourselves are only partially true. This makes it difficult to stop. If we can’t
even identify a problem, how can we resolve it?
Now, what I’m referring to is not a full-blown
existential crisis, what Albert Camus characterized as the sudden realization
of the absurdity of life. When that happens, it's as if the fourth wall suddenly
crumbles and we find ourselves awkwardly staring out from a stage at an
audience that breathes a collective sigh of relief because they realize that
everyone is finally on the same page.
No, it's not that. What I'm referring to is
just a dipping of the figurative toe into the deep end of the pool. You don't
question everything or feel alone, without excuses. You just realize that
you've never taken an earnest look in the mirror while behaving in a specific
way. Unimpeded by reflection or serious consideration, this behavior just feels
natural.
Until, of course, it doesn’t.
Once that happens, once that Pandora’s Box
opens, it can’t be undone. You will forever question yourself for behaving in
such a way whenever the opportunity presents itself. You will never be able to
really shirk that inner voice that tells you that what you're doing is
ridiculous and you will never be able to fully take yourself seriously when you
are doing whatever it is you are doing, provided you can bring yourself to do
it in the first place.
I've been having these mini-existential
epiphanies since I was a kid. I'm serious. I remember playing with action
figures and having the revelation in elementary school. I looked down and
realized that I wasn’t holding Dice and Storm Shadow, but rather two pieces of
human-shaped plastic that had “Made in Japan” stamped on their asses. I
remember being in a club in Detroit in my mid-twenties and realizing, at a very
sober and very aggravated five in the morning, that I was the only person who
was both over 25 and not on Molly. I remember staring into the bathroom mirror
of a Brooklyn dive on a Thursday night/Friday morning knowing that the
bloodshot-eyed, nearly incoherent 30-year-old in front of me would somehow have
to drag his hungover ass to work in just a few hours, but at least knew that my
situation was gravy compared to my even drunker friend who was gearing up to go
home to his wife and kid.
There is a certain line that you suddenly
realize you've crossed that doesn't amount to an ethical or moral violation—you
just understand that what you're doing is something that you shouldn't be doing
anymore. It’s the super-ego or self-for-others or internalized mores of your
culture or whatever telling you to act your age.
Most recently, this kind of realization took
place out front of a row house in West Philadelphia as my thirty-five-year-old
self-realized that my band was about to play to a bunch of college kids in a
basement venue that probably wasn't more than ten feet wide. Once I got into
that basement, I realized I was wrong. The basement was only about eight feet
wide. Worse, there were only a handful of kids there, waiting for us to play.
Even worse, one of them was high school drunk in a way that was not just a
level of intoxication.
I'm not saying that there's a categorical line
in the sand that prohibits someone who has reached the age of 35 from playing
at a party for people in their twenties, or that people shouldn't be amped to
take the stage whenever the opportunity presents itself. However, there is a
moment in time when you realize that maybe you shouldn't be driving over one
hundred miles to play in the dank basement of a punk house to perhaps half a
dozen people who could not care less about your music because they are really just
there to get shitfaced before heading out to one of the college bars up the
block, and their primarily concerns are limited to getting laid and hoping that
their fake IDs don't get confiscated by any over-scrupulous doormen.
What I am saying is that these kinds of shows
can get weird. Unfortunately, when they're weird, they're very weird.
And this show was very weird.
It wasn't weird because of anything that was
specifically said or done. It was weird because it was transgressive while
being held in an ostensibly inclusive space. Put in a less academic way, this
basement was open to everyone, but more open to those who belonged. And we did
not belong—largely because three of the four of us were more than a decade
older than everyone else there.
Now, one may feel that I'm putting too great
an emphasis on age. Perhaps these people who welcomed me into the house were
more than happy to accommodate us and the age gap didn't even register for
them. Perhaps the awkwardness was entirely in my head or perhaps the
awkwardness had only come about because the other bands and people at the party
knew each other and we were outsiders. After all, every person I spoke to was
pleasant and welcoming once any initial coldness subsided.
While all of this may all be true, it seems
doubtful. It seems doubtful because you typically can discern not only the
sense of being out of place, but the reason why you are out of place. While I
was there, it was because I was old, and they were young.
On top of feeling myself an alien, a stranger,
what was disorienting about this incident was that it was a bit of a step
through the looking glass. When I normally feel out of place, it is not because
I’m too old, but because I’m too young. This is largely because of where I now
work: The Upper East Side.
This is not to say that everyone who lives in
the Upper East Side is decrepit or senile or extremely rude or incapable of
quickly paying for something at the drug store and not causing a scene because
of some perceived slight from the cashier. It’s just that these are the types
of people that you see during the day because everyone else is at work or
school.
However, it’s not just age. When you're on the
Upper East Side, you feel like an outsider because you’re almost always
discernibly poorer than the person next to you. And they will let you know that
they know that you’re poorer than them. It's one of their few positive
qualities—honesty when dealing with the peasants. Some of the things they find
a bit more difficult include: Treating workers in the service industry with
respect, following basic parking signs, and picking up after their moribund toy
dogs. The streets may be lined with BMWs and Mercedes, but the sidewalks are
mined like Cambodia.
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| Finnegans Wake Pub |
Suffice
to say, I walked into Finnegans
Wake Pub (1361 1st
Avenue, Upper East Side) for lunch one day assuming that I would be able to
feel every set of eyes up and down the bar on me. And I did. I did because I
was one of two people in the bar (minus the staff) under the age of 70. I was,
however, the only unaccompanied one, and I couldn’t shake the feeling as though
I’d interrupted something.
Of
course, after a while the people at the corner of the bar went back to their
conversations and the solo Irish octogenarian next to me went back to reading
the Post and nursing his Guinness, but it dawned on me that Finnegans
Wake was not possessed of the typical snootiness of the neighborhood or the
typical signs of desperation that one finds when going to old man bars. This
was different.
It
was different because it was a relic without being timeless, a replica or in
shambles. And that’s an oddity in New York City. It wasn’t too sophisticated to
change; it didn’t celebrate itself for remaining in business while so many
other places like it had failed; it most certainly wasn’t retro; and it wasn’t
in any way a dive. It had remained a local bar that catered to moderately
affluent regulars in the neighborhood even as these regulars got older and the
neighborhood and tastes radically changed. The bar, of course, did not.
From
what I could tell, it had never tried to cater to Gen Xers or Millennials.
Avocado is not on the menu and you’ll probably get slapped in the face if you
ask the bartender for any cocktail that has been invented in the past fifty
years. Unlike the Irish pubs in Midtown with names like Murphy’s or McGee’s or
Mulligan’s, it still served chicken in a basket, didn’t seem too keen on craft
beer and had the radio tuned to a station that only played the hits from the
era in which the bar opened—the 1970s.
That
Finnegans Wake is set in its ways is undeniable and, in many ways,
unremarkable. Many other bars are set in their ways. However, I couldn’t help
but feel as though the bar was unique. As I sat there eating my chicken in a
basket, drinking my Guinness, enjoying the fact that only Rush could make a hit
with a 7/8 time signature, and wondering how the hell most of the scotches
behind the bar are pronounced, I came to realize that the thing that made the
bar unique was that it was anachronistic, but did not elicit a sense of
nostalgia.
This
provided me with some insight on the meaning of nostalgia. It’s not just a
fondness for the past or the act of reliving a memory. It’s a return to an
activity or place following that mini-epiphany about being too old for
something that I described above. Nostalgia is what happens when you return to
something as a different person and interact with its simulacrum. Both subject
and object are different.
This
is not what’s happening at Finnegans Wake. Like the novel from which the bar
gets its name, you get the impression that the day’s events at the pub are
something of a continuous cycle that hasn’t changed much in some time, and that
the regulars who participate in this cycle never end up feeling nostalgic
because they’ve never consciously broken from this cycle for long enough to
feel alienated from it.
In
a city where virtually everything is perpetually in flux or changing or
becoming the figurative shadow of its former self while I’m living through a
period of life where friendships are in flux or changing or becoming the
figurative shadow of their former selves, there’s a rare level of comfort in
seeing a pub like that with regulars who seem so comfortable refusing to act
their age.
Link:
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