Aging is groovy

Aging is fun, y'all. (I mean, except for the fact that it takes me four hours and 17 cups of coffee to haul my ass out of bed in the morning.) No, what I mean is stuff like this: I hated Led Zeppelin when I was a teenager. In part because I was all into the gentlest of folk and blues at the time, the sadder and more acoustic the better. And also because my brothers all loved them and played them in the house all the time. ALL THE TIME. UGH, amirite? But now, my son -- who will turn 16 in a matter of days and honestly I'm nervous -- has gotten into them and frequently puts them on in the car when we're going anywhere. And my reaction never fails to crack me the hell up. It's not just that I know every song, I know every word of the lyrics, every shift in tone and rhythm, and can't stop myself from joyfully singing and air-guitaring and drumming along. (Although I do. And when I tell you I'm good, I mean I'm good.) The part that makes me laugh is my utter delight at the first note, the first drum-tap, the first indication that yes, this is that LZ song that was imprinted in my neurons sometime during the late 70's/early 80's, against my will and possibly with malice aforethought. That delight, that thrill, which suggests that this song brings me back to a beautiful moment in my childhood when the world was full of bliss and shining promise. Ahhhhhh. But. It may come as a shock to you that I was not, in fact, the most cheerful and bubbly of teenagers. I distinctly remember describing high school this way in my journal: "We are all just rats in the gutter, snarling over scraps of garbage." I was a lot of fun to be around in those days. But even if I had been a happy, well-adjusted high-schooler, calmly and happily achieving goals right and left and making secure plans for the future – instead of fantasizing about stealing a pickup truck and starting an endless trek around the country with a banjo and a dog, scratching out barely-sustenance wages in hardscrabble jobs, avoiding human contact and writing dystopian novels which would be buried in my unmarked grave with me (see? I did have plans!) – even if I had been the most positive-oriented kid, I still hated Led Zeppelin. So why the blissful response to the merest hint of one of their songs now, forty years later? I can only assume that I've grown into a more complex person, able to appreciate a wider variety of cultural forms. That I've had, over the last four decades, a lot of experience which – Wait. No. That's not it. I think it's this: I'm far enough away from that time, now, to view my snarly, melancholy 15-year-old self with compassion but not indulgence. I'm not subject to her authentic but limited viewpoint, her still-narrow spectrum of emotional reference. The exposure to LZ's music at the time laid a foundation which I was not able to appreciate until later in life. LZ's music is good, of course: it's complex, musically, lyrically, emotionally. And to be truly honest, I probably even liked them for that at the time, even if their sound didn't match my own emotional register. But the main thing that I like about hearing them now, really, is the fun of living in two different ages at once – to inhabit, simultaneously, my 55-year-old's and my 15-year-old's minds. They are obviously one mind, but one has grown enough from, and beyond, the other, that they are also two. Much like carrying my in-utero children made me feel both singular and plural at once. It's trippy, man. So often I feel like some stock stoner character from a movie, having pseudo-profound epiphanies. WE ARE ALL JUST LIKE HYDRA, MAN, GROWING WHOLE NEW PEOPLE OUT OF OUR ARMS AND WHATNOT. Except not really arms, obviously, but memories and selves and minds. But we really are. It's an I-am-we feeling. Which is a pretty cool, pretty trippy experience to want to rock out about. And if you need to rock out over some kind of trippy, wild, out-of-this-world perceptual epiphany, it turns out, Led Zeppelin has some pretty good rockin songs to help you do that.