Seep
I was at a bar recently (it all comes back to sitting on rickety stools, the ones that hum with the sorrows of hundreds of others who previously sat on them), and saw a sign that said: no one born before 2001 can have a drink. I took out my notebook and crossed out an item on my to-do list: live to see this.
I am a millennial in my blood, like that show The Last of Us, where the fungus gets into you and makes you those clicker things that shriek at anyone not like them. I shrieked into my notebook - while I was watching the Twin Towers collapse, these young ones were being born. It doesn't seem fair, these newly minted drinkers being able to order a beer when they can't yet process what they missed, the sadness and irrelevance of being older creeping up on me. I ordered another Old Fashioned and caressed it like a secret, no one except me has surely ever felt this - the selfishness of being older and yet not any wiser.
I wrote a bad poem about this moment, and said in my caption: "I'm old as s***." Someone commented, then get off the toilet. I wasn't sure if this was a comment meant to diminish me, and the only solution seemed to respond with an ironic emoji. Am I the problem? Or is the younger generation entitled? There's no way to know, because we're all biased, steeped in our own sorrows, relentlessly trying to promote our own generation.
I went back to right after college, when I was still getting carded. The thrill of ordering a drink. The equivalent of doing something illicit, secret. Finally, old enough. Now I sit on the edge of my bar stool and see the reflection of the last decade in my bourbon, the sadness of having to let go of my twenties approaching, just a sip away from finishing off the now warm back wash and ordering another one.
This is all to say: I am older. And not wiser. These young bucks know more than me. And that's what hurts the most - that I have aged, with almost nothing to show for it.
My lemon wedge seeps into the alcohol, a reminder that the arrogance of our age merely mingles with the main player: the younger generation.