Sunday Music: Kids These Days

My wife is trying to make sense of me being upset that they’ve fenced off a stretch of one of our favorite rails-to-trails, where an off-shooting and dangerously narrow and rocky bit juts up 20 feet higher than the regular trail, which, since you’re already on the side of a mountain, makes the view of the small stream and highway below even more aggressive. I’m, in the moment, lamenting how we used to ride our bikes up the mini cliff how it irks me how kids won’t be able to do that anymore.

“Sometimes I really wonder how you’re still alive. How was THAT a good idea. Like, ever?!”

I concede, “You do make a good point. But we didn’t die, it was fun, and, I guess I probably don’t want to know why they actually fenced this off. Maybe it also has something to do with rails to trails, because we were also perfectly happy when this was rails without legitimized, maintained trails. Oh look,” I interrupt my own thought, “is that a bloody baseball hat, all dirty and tattered up, right over there, next to that police tape,” I’m pointing at nothing, but it’s enough to get a “let’s keep walking before I find a less fenced off area to push you down” look.

“Kids these days probably wouldn’t even ride a bike up there. We did walk up it with the nephews, they were alright. Kids these days probably wouldn’t do it on their own unless it was for an Instagram shot or something, but even then, of what, the cars zipping by? The Fortnite de-gen’s wouldn’t come outside for this. Maybe almost no one would anymore except the craziest kids. Still, I’d want those kids to have the chance to feel on top of the world like we used to.”

It’s a reoccurring theme in my life lately. How the tools and access to the world we have shapes our experience in the world, and then the world goes and changes on us. Kids these days just aren’t kids those days because “kids” solely means “young humans who are still newish at figuring the world and people around them out.” The kids’ setting is still the same, it’s the world they’re set in that we grownup kids keep changing.

It’s wild to think how the tools we have determine the context and stories we make. Bikes and train tracks up the sides of mountain were part of my upbringing. Video chats and video games, or travel sports and a zoom lectures are the ways of kids and the world today, they’re the ways of the adult world made for kids today.

But it doesn’t mean the kids don’t have just as much going on inside of their heads. The kids always do. We need that reminder too. Which reminds me of how Jackson Brown wrote “These Days” when he was only 16. A 16-year-old saying “Don’t confront me with my failures, I have not forgotten them,” is way different than a 71-year-old saying it, just saying. It’s Cash versus Reznor doing “Hurt” all over again.

This is the thing about art, both making art and consuming art. Making it requires one set of perspective and tools, consuming it requires a different set. And I’m not just talking about passive consumption, I’m talking about critical consumption, aware assumption.

The kind you get standing on top of the world while telling yourself and you’re friends how brave you are, even thought you’re secretly a little scared to fall, and most of all you’re excited to see more of the world, more of everything, and then keep moving onwards on your adventures. The kind you look at in the moment as, “Why the hell not?!” but then look at later and wonder “What the hell was I thinking?!” The kind that’s worth a story. The kind that’s worthy of remembering, of adding your perspective to all over again.

h/t Ed for the FT article that inspired this post. Also, h/t to Hal Hershfield and Julia Carreon who brought versions of this topic up repeatedly, and Jim O’Shaughnessy and his wonderful journaling habit. All sorts of related stuff below:

Oh and because I can’t resist, the sheer instability inside of every detail of this Paul Westerberg version, it’s what makes it one of my favorite “These Days” renditions. He somehow seems to catch both the reality of a crackly voice later in life, and holds it up against the habits that cause the gnarled rasp all in one song. What is going on rhythmically here too? Mostly Westerberg multitracking probably but still, it’s too fast and too slow for every word in perfected awkwardness. It makes me feel things, I don’t know.

Ps. there’s something wrong with the kids in my neighborhood…