It's Hip To Be Square

A friend of mine told me while she was shopping for groceries the other day, she heard "I Wanna Be Sedated" by the Ramones on the Muzak. Not an easy-listening version, but the real hardcore punk version. It was an amusing enough image, standing in the frozen food aisle, as Joey wails, "I can't control my fingers, I can't control my brain, Oh no oh oh oh oh." Another wet cleanup on aisle four.
And that's when we came to the realization that we are old. It wasn't necessarily that the grocery store was so hip and cool that they were playing punk rock, but we had lived long enough that the music of our youth was no longer cutting edge. The suggestion that any or all of us needed to be medicated was no longer scary or disturbing. Every day we see commercials for this sleep aid or that form of male enhancement, the fact that the Ramones have yet to be licensed by some major pharmaceutical company is a kind of pleasant surprise.
So now we live in a time where people "our age" want to host "The Tonight Show." People who are "our age" get the joke when Conan O'Brien chose to end his seven month reign as nominal king of the late-night world by playing "Freebird." All this stuff must be as mildly incomprehensible to your average fifteen-year-old as Johnny Carson and Dean Martin were to me back when I was in junior high.
I have lived long enough that the cool toys that I was too old for when I was in college have become action stars in their own films. Spiderman has been sent back to high school after burning through his initial movie renaissance in just eight years. I asked my wife why all the kids were wearing their baseball caps with the labels still stuck to them, and she replied, "because it's the fashion." I don't get it anymore. Most of the music on my fancy mp3 player comes from an era before the compact disc. Even my fancy mp3 player is a couple generations old, and my cell phone can't project 3D holograms of my loved ones. The kids at school thought I was cool for a few weeks when they found out that I played Guitar Hero, but they lost interest when they found out that I didn't have DJ Hero. It didn't help that I told them that my favorite rap album was "Tougher Than Leather." They looked up, blankly, "What's an album?"
Well, just put me in a wheelchair, get me to the show. Hurry hurry hurry, before I go loco.