I'm Gonna Shout It Till They Cut Out My Tongue

I made my way back to Northside Diner, the underworld of my hometown, this morning.

This time I brought a friend to the secrecy of it all, a good friend from high school, Allie.  We met at 8.

"8 o' clock?! That early?  Do you have plans for the rest of the day?"

 It's in pink because she is a girl.  And I said to her, "No, but I like getting up early for breakfast or it doesn't feel like breakfast!"

That was in normal color because I'm a boy.

So it was agreed, and I flopped like a landed fish out of bed ten minutes till 8 AM.  Hit the restroom, pet the dogs and use an annoying voice to greet them this morning, and then put on my shoes and fly out the door.  I make it to Northside Diner at 8 sharp, and she isn't there yet.  Girls...can't live with em, can't cook and clean without em.

Well she was only 1 minute late so it isn't a huge deal.  She found me in the back corner, one booth past the one I sat in for the experience that prompted my previous post about the underworld.  She heads over as I am receiving coffee from the waitress.  We take about ten minutes to order because we're too busy trying to catch up at first glance that we haven't even looked at the menu.  Or I haven't anyway.  The first time the waitress comes back for our order, I haven't even touched a menu.

If you're a true fan of me, you'll know that I ordered 'Two in the Nest' at my last visit to Northside.  I order it again, and Allie gets "Short Chicks', which is eggs, toast, and a short stack of pancakes.  If you're wondering if the blog post gets any better than talking about what was ordered, the answer is no.  Nothing cool happens, so you could just go now.  Go read a dictionary, or go cut your nails, or go pee your name on a wall.  All are exponentially more intense than the remainder of this post.

If you're still here, I applaud your lack of desire to be entertained.

Anyhow, we got to chatting about all sorts of stuff over the course of nearly three hours.  And I think the thought that has stuck with me the most is that of how I define age.  I believe it is erroneous to measure someone's age in years, but rather their inability to hope or dream anymore.  I know people my age, in years, who are old men already.

Allow me to explain.  Running in the same vein of my past posts, I will dip into hippie terms like "The System", "The Man", and "Spontaneous Cerebral Re-Unification".  That last one isn't really a hippie term, just kind of a made up word I use to describe hippies and that whole "Enlightenment via Drugs" thing.  Anyhow, on to the complaints about "The Man"!

"The System" is hard to beat, and easy to join.  By "The System", I mean society in general and the views it has of the world.  Main parameters of thought that "The System" operates within include, but are not limited to: "Things can not be changed", "Money will give you what you want", "If you can't succeed alone, you won't succeed at all", and etc.  The one that I mainly want to focus on is "Things can not be changed."  I think this is the biggest of them all because once you accept that nothing can be changed, you can accept every other societal norm of America.

Using the societal norm that I learned in public school, about how I should arrange my thoughts, I have surmised my thesis.  Ahem.

"Age is not a count of how many years one has.  Age is one of two things, either young or old, and whether you are one or the other is decided by the presence or absence of hope."

When you give up because fighting "The System" is harder than joining it, you have aged.  You are old.  And as soon as you join it, you begin saying things like "Politics will never change.  They're all about money and it's no use anymore", or "The environment has been screwed for centuries", or "Every man/woman is the same", or "Money can get someone out of anything".

Now, some of those points may not be totally untrue.  But as an individual recites them with dreary eyes and shaking head, the meaning behind the words shouts "...And it can't ever be changed!"

It's the most disheartening to see my uncles and aunts talk about how "The System" is the only way, yadda yadda, but they spent their entire youths fighting it.  When did they lose, or should I say, when did they choose to lose?

Carl and Ellie, still dreaming and hoping.

Carl devoid of hope.

I may become just like them.  I may fall in line with the rest of the drones, plug into the mainframe of "The System" and offer my small contribution to the hive mind setup.  Granted, some small acceptances of "The System" are acceptable to me.  If a situation arises where one needs money to support others, resigning one's dreams for a certain job to take that which is presented is a good choice.  But signing yourself away because humming along with the masses is easy, and maintaining your own melody is just too hard to focus on with all the dissonance, that is what it means to become old.

Like I said, I may become and old man in a year or two.  I would like to think that this isn't the case, but I'm not naieve enough to think that I am beyond surrender to "The System".  Countless flower children and activists of the sixties and seventies resigned to the norm, and they stand out as one of the most crusading generations of American history.  I may too fall into an exhausted acceptance of the system.

But I'm young now, my tongue is sharp, and my senses keen.  As a young'un, I'm going to stand as one who says that things can be changed.  They shush me frequently, but I shout louder.  And if I wasn't shouting louder in response to every person that raised a pointer finger across their pursed lips with an intense glare, it would be a big step towards becoming an old man.