Three Beers In, Twenty-One Old

The firs time I felt old, I was twenty-one years old.

It happened at the counter of a bar in Melbourne’s north that’s quickly becoming uncool - whether through its own awareness of ‘cool’ or the sudden influx of people hoping some of its coolness will rub off on them like a type of mixture that can be added to them with no dilution or transmutation. I was nursing an unnamed beer, something with a name like vintage, homebrew, locally produced, that tastes like a mixture of metal and yeast but it’s cheap and it pours like water - which I’m beginning to think this beer contains more of than first thought. It’s the bottom end of 2014, a night known as “the gig” for many us and I’m too early as usual. Being twenty-one, I’m suffering my quarter life crisis: it could be midlife crisis if fate decides early enough that I’ve wasted the gift of life by eating an entire family size pizza while watching pirated television. As 2014 is speeding towards its end, the nineties revival is in full throttle around me and speeding towards the vanishing point of its own ironic fashion, all a cloud of elastic chokers, X-Files revivals and cassette players worn on the hip like gunslingers of old.

I'm tired, confused with university and all the while being told that this is normal to feel like this. It's apparently normal to feel like slitting your throat with the sharp edge of an assignment. Your twenties are apparently the time to feel like this - I wonder if that means when I'm older, I'll have been expected to pack it in. Can't feel these feelings at fourty - you're supposed to have felt them earlier.

A guy walks past in what I think is an all corduroy ensemble. It’s been a subtle transition, from uncool to cool to hip and finally back to uncool. Not just for fashion, for the place itself.

I started coming here when I was seventeen. Mum would come with to watch my friend’s band, chaperoning me along with all the other parents and when she wasn’t bottling any sleazy guys as they crawled from the dark, sticky corners, she’d get me a beer.

I was in high school still – all of us who went to the bar were were - and we’d meet the older brothers and older sisters, the mysterious and erudite twenty-two year olds of the bar. They were strange and wise creatures, how did their lives work? They seemed to have things figured out, which was in stark contrast to me, seventeen, no fucking clue about anything, terrible at school, no idea for a future in university or nothing.

It became our sort of local – local as you can be a good five kilometres from the nearest house of ours – but we all began to congregate there in the years after university. It was a way of keeping in contact, meeting up, organising dates and hang outs. It was filthy; a kind of place coated in black slimy grime in the bathrooms, people pissing on the pool tables every Thursday we were there, the arcade machines going through so much wear and tear you could hear the memory boards and circuits crying out. Every Thursday the same music playing, Hunters and Collectors, INXS, Tame Impala, the sound of smashing glasses, all culminating in a growing roar of cheers and cries of ‘Taxi!’. There were rules: no hooking up, it was seen as too disgusting a place to hook up in. Romance doesn’t exactly flourish there. That didn't stop some people.

It became some sort of weird growth, bacterial. An echo chamber that perpetuates high school. I shudder at that now. I don’t think I had a great time in high school.

I know how shocking that must be: a writer who didn’t enjoy high school? Well I’d hold off contacting a publishing house just yet for a finder’s fee, as like most things in life it’s more complicated than things first seem. I had a decent enough time during my stint in the secondary education system, serving six years hard time, but it went as well as it could have.

It’s rather that later events have soured fond memories, as certain people have made me look back on previously treasured times and say the now famous words ‘What the fuck was I doing?’. I cringe in embarrassment, the kind that makes me want to face into a corner and hope that Ron Fricke or Godfrey Reggio make a time-lapse footage of me starving to death while Hopi Indians chant Koyannisqatsi over my decaying corpse.

(although Writers are famously born out of such circumstance and if you had seen my writing post high school, you would have taken me out the back, put a double-barrelled to my head, and done what Travis did to Old Yeller to put me out of my misery and angst)

Most of us will take one look at ourselves at some point after high school and do what most of us do: re-invent ourselves. We re-define what we learnt, find new friends, move away from your home town and generally start to organise the past into a something we can deal with. But what if you choose to never re-order the past and just live in there? We learn from the past, hindsight is a powerful learning tool for us because it forces you to re-evaluate the things that you’ve already seen.

But it’s important to face those unwanted things, you learn what is good and bad about yourself.

I know the above sounds like an endorsement for high school reminiscence and it isn’t, it’s an endorsement for cautious nostalgia and judicious hindsight. It’s a plea to understand your past in context

My friend’s band is carrying equipment in, flexing their guitar arms to any prospective women in the audience. He’s been in four bands so far, each one is the one that makes it, this particular band has changed their names so many times that they don’t even know who they are. When they aren’t belting out tributes to Eddie Floyd or any of the long dead bands of the Stax and Decca era, they’re talking about how they are “in a band”. Saying you’re in a band is half of the act I assume.

It’s gotta approach a kind of singularity eventually, where Kurt Cobain tears himself from the grave and begins his new career in Neo-Nirvana before singing into the shotgun microphone again and American Apparel can print shirts with his new suicide note on the front.

I wonder how far you have to crawl up your own ass before you’re designated as a missing person.

I wonder how seriously you’re meant to take everything as a young adult and how much leeway you’re supposed to give things.

I wonder why I still come to this place?

#whinge #complaint #age #nostalgia #bar #writing #essay