56

Some thoughts that crossed my mind in the days after my birthday

We all do it - ruminate.

Namely when we know that we have a LOT LESS years ahead of us than behind us, and more so when there is an entire population SCARED AF because of that one truth.

Don’t be scared, guys.

Be Brave…because why?

Yup yup - my favorite thing to tell people is “bravery requires fear.”

Don’t be scared of getting older. Lots of folks, specifically since 2020, have been racing towards the end, not even more than a few years younger than I am.

It is really very sad - most folks do not think, not even for a tiny moment, that one day they will be 60 in four years. None of us thinks that one day our hair will go grey, that it will take a lot of effort for plenty of us just to get out of bed in the morning without feeling the years. I am not there yet, but, I am certain that I will get there.

And you know what?

It is a beautiful thing indeed. It used to be, or at least we were made to believe it, that only women were “afraid” of getting older, when in reality, I feel like those who came before us were merely afraid of no longer “being cute.”

Says who?

My cousin, Waipuna, and I on my 36th birthday

Me and the kids from the ARISE program at Mt. San Antonio College in 2018, and me? Age 48.

Looking back in time, even to a very few years ago, I see that, more than anything else, there is not one thing outside of us that will cause it that we “stay” whatever is meant to be thought of as “young” these days. I find it very odd, as well, that there is an entire generation of both those older than we are, as well as those younger than we are, who constantly seek out, and try to find, anything that ought to make anyone else, at all, feel old, feel ugly, feel useless, and use that shit against us, as though we give an actual fuck about that shit….and I speak for my generation, the one marked “X”, when I state “eat your lovely little envious hearts out, all those who want to use our years against us, as though somehow that is the only thing that my generation learned…how to remain in place.”

Oh honeys, we ain’t EVER gonna do THAT!

We have NEVER done that…not during our youth, nor during our time raising our children, and damned surely not now, not when we finally are no longer worried what our parents think, even if they are alive, or what our families, namely the extended folks, at least in my own case, have to say about anything - lots of them regarded us as being trashy, out of control, “drug addicts,” “whores,” “devil worshipers,” and so on and so forth. The only reason we were ever perceived as such?

Because even way back then, the generation that raised us KNEW that we were their BIGGEST, GNARLIEST responsibility, and by the standards that their parents set is what we were judged, by our parents.

Myself, when mine were mad, namely my pops, I was called a “dope fiend pot head who will never get anywhere in life…” and “you have so much talent, and you choose to dance rather than do something stable, like become a journalist and do the thing that WE want you to do…” and thankfully a whole LOT of us still are not listening to that garbage, and yes, yes indeed we absolutely DO SO love our parents, and grandparents, the vast majority of us, even if they treated a whole lot of us like shit.

We knew the value, even when we were very young, the importance, the need for a strong support systems, so we cultivated them ourselves, with our friends, other family members, and in my case, it was my mother’s best friend’s family. Without Tia Patsy and all of my adopted “MexiWaiʻīan” family, the Rodriguez and Garcia, respectively, I do not know what it means to be an actual part of, rather than a bit player in, a family. This is not to say that my own parents did not do that much for me, because they tried, very dearly, to make it so that I would be part of the families they each came from.

And I was, but only to the extent that I could tolerate their bullying.

Needless to say, because of that much, my parents never really had it easy, where I was concerned, with their own families - because I could be disciplined, but never truly controlled, and that was a problem, and remains to be one now, collectively within my generation.

It does not have to be this way, at all.

The thing that getting a year older gifts us with is not just the proof needed to know that we are doing as much as we can “the right way,” but more, the proof that we have had, for all of our lives, that we have done that forever.

Seriously.

There is a reason Generation X continues to be excluded, it seems, from life.

It is totally because we are the generation which was raised hard, with parents who went through things that we could not fathom having been that easy - but they made it long enough to bring us into this world. No matter how anyone feels about that much, and no matter how much sarcasm we add to all of our conversations, the bottom line truth is that we have always known that we would get this far, even if the people we spent so much time with while children talked shit to us like we would never make it past the age of 30.

Here we are, alive and kickinʻ, just like the song says…

56

What 56 looks like for a lot of us

Turning 56, I was told, many years ago, by my fatherʻs little sister, was “the turning point, when a woman becomes matronly.” She said it when I was 46. She is a shrink. She knows what to say and how to say anything she wants anyone else to believe. What she forgot?

I had therapists who were more interested in helping me heal than much else, and the majority of them were older than she is. They were the very ones who taught me that there would be an entire population of people who came before me who would want to keep me in the place that they LOVE TO keep us all in.

A place where we are never going to be “as good as” they are, and a place where what the world sees, versus what is the lived truth, is more important than anything else, including how we felt about ourselves.

How we feel about ourselves collectively is the end result of being told no all the time, is the result of decades where we raised each other, even if our mothers stayed home with us - because even they hustled from home, exactly the way that we do. We just do it out loud, never caring what anyone else thinks of what we are doing, of what makes our hearts and souls sing out loud, sometimes in the grocery store where Motley Crue is now in the loud speakers overhead.

Those women with graying hair banging our heads in aisle 13, and those men who clearly have back issues, who are also in aisle 13, playing air guitar while something wicked plays - our “oldies but goodies” is actual rock, and all of it speaks of all what is going on, all what has happened, over the course of time - and not the cutesy bullshit, but the shit that made our parents call us Satan worshipers.

Namely Ozzy….

Those who made it so that an entire Generation had neck issues before we were 21, knew way too much about how certain types of people, namely men, got what they wanted - but haha, that guilt and shame shit no longer works on us. We call it out, loudly, proudly, and without regard for old or even young pervs.

We call it out when jealous harpies want to remind us constantly that we, too, will end up old, wrinkled, with health issues we cannot pronounce correctly, nor the names of the bullshit that they think we will be “required to take” if we “want to live as long as” they have - and of course they have lived that long…it is very easy to do that if the powers that yet (think they) be are the same age as those folks - it is real easy to talk shit still, namely when you can afford to.

The thing that we afforded ourselves is limited fucks to give, and the gift of not tolerating anyoneʻs bullshit - some folks call it “incorrigible,” and others “unacceptable,” when really, it is all about control of how we feel about ourselves, and most of it coming from THAT specific generation is all and only about the seen world, the seen physicality, the seen everything - and really not a whole lot about the soul.

And speaking of the soul?

That is where GenX actually lives from.

We were, lots of us, forced into beliefs that many of us do not even adhere to at this point. We were right not to. We could see the way that certain things were written, stated, interpreted, and when we spoke up and out about the lies, spoke up and out about how we really felt, not about God, nor religion, but the way that we were forced to believe “or else” is the thing that, front and center, has always been the Achilles heel (and heal) for the generation which “raised” us (when they had time, that is…which seemed like never, really. My parents RAN A CHURCH …how much time does anyone REALLY believe they had for us?) (not a lot, lemme tell ya).

If they could not scare the piss out of us with their rhetoric that sounded way too much like that of our grandparentsʻ, they, lots of them, kept a lot of us in line with their big scary God who we were told would “get” us. When we spoke up about it, asked for better clarity, and were ignored, or even lied to, we ended up grounded.

Because those who tried scaring us with their “loving” God never thought about the FACT that those tactics never worked when we were tiny, and will never work now, because that shit never worked when we were teens, nor young adults - and speaking up meant that we would be straight up TOLD that we were going to our momsʻ Godʻs hell.

The thing that lots of us had to respond to that with was “oh…well, according to you, Ozzy will be there, as will Jack Danielʻs and the dudes who learned that weed was medicine…”

Grounded.

Not for more than calling out the bullshit that a lot of them never believed, but followed, because their parents were masters at scaring the piss out of them.

This is not to say that we are bullet-proof…but we are damned close, seriously.

SOOOOOOO….because it was my birthday a few days ago, it means, at least to me, that it was GENERATION Xʻs birthday, too!

Happy Birthday Guys !

Make sure you are head-banginʻ and air-guitar playinʻ in aisle 13…I will be the one in the middle, metal horns straight up….