You’re Older Than You’ve Ever Been, and Now You’re Even Older
How old am I? I’m so old, my first husband was a noise musician. How old am I? I’m so old, I own a print photograph of myself standing in front of the wall Elliott Smith stood in front of on the cover of Figure 8 which was taken while he was still alive. How old am I? I’m so old, I’m doing something about my alcoholism. Etc. Etc.
Whenever I say I am old, there is always an ever yet still older friend of mine who informs me I am, in fact, not. These friends are generally so old (how old are they?) that, had they bred, I could be their child, but not in a precocious way — more in a “I just returned home defeated after my divorce with my two preteens in tow” kind of way. I was young enough to still be considered precocious when I first met them, which explains their mental disconnect.
I now find myself at the age in which I view everyone in their 20s as a child. The phenomenon of adult child is most pervasive in New York City, where all the children dress like a child’s idea of a grownup, serving long coat and loafer looks on the subway. I half expect their loafers to slide off their feet; they’re like kids tottering around playing dress up in mommy’s closet, but if mommy’s closet was Zara.
With the exception of the friends who are old enough to be my parents, most are younger and consider me ancient accordingly. This is a byproduct of the fact I had virtually no friends before I started doing comedy, and I only started doing comedy when I was in my mid 20s.
Ours are symbiotic relationships — I can judge their youthful transgressions, like ordering anything but water at a bar and fucking people they met on their phones, and they can roll their eyes at my irrelevancy, my ceaseless extolling of the values of a generation I don’t even belong to but, through osmosis, created my principled principles (that being Generation X’s — I am, sadly, an elder millennial).
The divides are endlessly apparent. I recently referenced The Bad News Bears in young company and the children (read: women in their late 20s who worked in a trade) only knew of the Billy Bob Thorton reboot. A comic on the show I host once did a bit about listening to Frank Ocean in college — and honey, he wasn’t talking about grad school. I refuse to believe someone who was too young to remember 9/11 happened can vote, yet here we are (and Bernie didn’t get the democratic nomination? That’s how you know the fix was in).
I now look upon recently shot photos of myself (one of the myriad gifts of doing stand up is that you are often tagged in unflattering photos taken without your knowledge or consent) and see that I have become, demonstrably, older than the last time I made a friend take headshots of me by the garbage cans outside my apartment. There is an ever-present divot between my eyebrows; lines have collected around my mouth. A friend once declared on a Logo show (want to feel old? Remember basic cable network Logo) that I resembled Fran Lebowitz if she looked less like a gnarled tree. He, however, said that almost a decade ago. I am now regularly aesthetically compared to Fran Lebowitz with no qualifiers.
How old am I? I’m so old, my pubescence coincided with the cultural dominance of boy bands and pop punk puerility. Thankfully, I was allergic to Total Request Live.
I was pretty lucky in that my female teenage idols were the Kims (Gordon and Deal), Courtney Love, Aimee Mann and the aforementioned Fran Lebowitz, who were all in their late 30s or 40s when I was in high school (a scrapbook a friend made for me about my favorite bands at the time stated Kim Gordon’s only defining characteristic was being “really old”).
Side Note: Let us now, not that you expected, wanted, or asked me to, speak about Olivia Rodrigo. A month ago I listened to her oeuvre on a long drive, curious about the kid who insisted on having The Breeders open for her at Madison Square Fucking Garden. Color me surprised that her bangers hit, even though they’re heavily inspired by the pop punk I loathed when I was her age.
I was pleased to find that she was incredibly neurotic and self aware — said neurosis manifests itself primarily around her boy craziness, but it makes sense, as she’s a child. The exes in her songs are often older than her, and she’s cognizant of the predatory nature of that (“girls your age know better”). Something about her songs made me remember and subsequently tell my therapist how my first real boyfriend, who I acquired at 18, was old enough to have graduated college and been an engineer at Boeing before we started “dating.” I had, well, never thought about the perversely skewed power dynamic of that before. Thanks, Olivia Rodrigo.
There was zero self awareness on the part of the teenybopper music that littered the landscape when I was her age, which might explain my lack of interest in it. And she says goddamn a lot, which I can’t not appreciate. “Teenage Dream,” which closes her second (and most recent) album, is a harrowing examination of the psyche of a (again, self aware) teenage girl. She seems to resent her youth, which is a good message for the children — one I wish I had coming from someone my own age at her age.
Side Note to the Side Note: OK, so in my day we had Fiona Apple, but that’s it — and more to the point, I hadn’t been raped yet (“I let the beast in too soon / I don’t know how to live without my hand on his throat / I fight him always and still” doesn’t hit the same when you’re a virgin). My friend John still owns a long sleeve t-shirt from the “When the Pawn…” tour, which I haven’t witnessed in the past decade but nevertheless covet the existence of. I told him that if I were to wear said shirt to Erewhon, I would undoubtedly be murdered for my drip.
While I’m not like other girls in that I have, since youth, found menopausal women fuckable, after the home haircut ferality of my teenage years came the commercially viable fuckability of my 20s. On the tail end of my anorexic slide when I started comedy, my wardrobe was all tight shirts and short skirts. I remember being praised for the darkness of my material — the implication was always, “Can you believe this traditionally attractive woman said that?” Yes, bitch. She has PTSD, why do you think she’s weaponizing her sexuality?
Side Note: I suppose we can’t talk about weaponizing sexuality without talking about the reason I did it in the first place, that being an immediately post-teenage idol of mine, PJ Harvey. Capitalizing off a passing resemblance I had to her before I started plucking my eyebrows, I posted a photo of myself in the bathroom of my childhood home wearing a teal bra and holding an American flag like I saw her do in an issue of Spin on my MySpace profile.
Side Note to the Side Note: I eventually waxed said eyebrows in order to try and elicit a positive response from the abusive ex I got from the MySpace photo, who subsequently said nothing when I returned from the salon — I hope, when Polly Jean plucked hers into non existence in the late ‘90s, it wasn’t for a similar reason.
While I am still considered fuckable to a niche demographic that thankfully includes my husband, the days in which my skin was poreless and my pants size 00 are long gone. I will say, with the gift of hindsight, that being commercially fuckable never did me any favors. I have an infinitely richer and more fulfilling life now that the crows feet have come to roost and middle aged white male TV writers are no longer taking me to dinners I thought were work related. Youth is a currency, yes, but the currency is like Dogecoin — rapidly decreasing in value with each passing minute, and not redeemable for anything you actually need. There is no sustainability in the preciousness of youth, which I now know because I am old. It will get you attention, but little else.
I have, in my old age, gained a nominal amount of weight, and with it anonymity. Thankfully the baggy look is in, which makes my dressing like David Byrne seem a sartorial choice and not a necessity. There are many benefits, I have learned, to being old, like the ability to no longer be exploited for your naïvety, and invisibility, which makes it easier to steal from Sephora.
Side Note: The argument that PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me is the best rock album of my formative decade, that being the ‘90s, is one I wish I could still get drunk enough to win. The engineer of said album (which inspired Kurt Cobain to record In Utero with him — I can also imagine getting drunk enough to argue that the reason God put Kurt Cobain on Earth was to turn people onto music that was better than his own), a primary component of its majesty, unexpectedly and unceremoniously died a month ago.
Shell shocked, I sobbed as I collected garbage out of the garage I had sold on the internet while processing the news. Selling garbage on the internet in order to survive was, is, the life I chose, because people like him placed the worm in my developing brain that told me selling out was tantamount to death, a philosophy now considered decrepit in a world in which the generation of “exposure” is now the be all, end all of creative existence.
Now this man is well and truly, biologically, dead, and his death means I am the only comedian to have ever recorded an album with him, a feat I did twice because the man who bankrolled it the first time wouldn’t give me the masters. I don’t know what to do with the existential weight of this knowledge. I have done nothing with the audio from the second session because I had a nervous breakdown shortly after recording it, which I am still crawling out of the mental detritus of.
The older you get, the more people you know die, and the more cognizant you are of your own mortality — the tenuousness of existence grows tendrils, and these tendrils slip, one by one, around your withered throat. I suppose this is another benefit of aging — an appreciation of the transient nature of life, something I assume a Zara shopper is incapable of feeling. I do, however, also know I am now too old to do anything but background work with the SAG-AFTRA card they forced me to get when I was in a pilot that didn’t get picked up. Oh, well.