An Age

It's so easy to be inconsistent these days, easy to be conflicted.  I've been thinking about what this "Age" might be termed by future scholars.  In what "Age" am I living?

"The Age of Failure"

Of course, that could be my own age.  I think of T.C. Boyle's opening lines in "Greasy Lake."

"There was a time when courtesy and winning ways went out of style, when it was good to be bad, when you cultivated decadence like a taste. We were all dangerous characters then. We wore torn-up leather jackets, slouched around with toothpicks in our mouths, sniffed glue and ether and what somebody claimed was cocaine. When we wheeled our parent's whining station wagons out onto the street we left a patch of rubber half a block long. We drank gin and grape juice. Tango, Thunderbird, and Bali Hai. We were nineteen. We were bad. We read Andre Gide and stuck elaborate poses to show that we didn't give a shit about anything. At night, we went up to Greasy Lake."

It is a great opening.  I ask, "When was that?  What time is he speaking of?"  And I usually get some bracketed date.

Youth.  It is "The Age of Hope."

Or used to be.  I'm working on a documentary about teenage suicide just now as part of someone else's grant.  I'm beginning to lose faith in the "Age of Hope."

"The Age of Expectations"

Thinking about such things alone in the early morning light is like playing solitaire.  Or maybe solitary scrabble.

Labels. They are totalizing.  They oversimplify.  But they stick.

I'm sure you have a few ideas.