life

Standing, Again, at Ground Zero: Trying to capture the depth of 9/11 for my child

~ Randy Blazak ~ 3 Comments

December 26, 2025

New York is like a giant magnet. I’ve been making pilgrimages to the city for over 40 years now for many different reasons. I had a speaking engagement there in 2018 and took my four-year old daughter and delighted at her constant wide eyes. (Although I had to tell her the bad news that if the Elmo in Times Square asked for a hug, we’d have to call the police.) So when Cozy, now 11, said what she wanted for Christmas was a trip to the Big Apple, I knew what we had to do.

There were some obligatory stops on the four-day stay in Manhattan, including shopping at Macy’s, the top of the Empire State Building, and the Christmas Tree at Rockefeller Center. But we were staying downtown, just a few blocks from the New York Stock Exchange, so I mustarded up the courage to suggest that we visit the 9/11 memorial. Born in 2014, my sixth-grader had limited knowledge about the event, other than it was a terrorist attack. When I was 11, I didn’t know much about the events of 1951, 13 years before my birth. The Korean War, that was it. I didn’t want to give her a history lesson, I just wanted to convey to her the weight of that day.

So on Tuesday morning, we walked over to the sacred ground as the rain mixed with snow. My first trip to Ground Zero was the summer of 2002, when the dust of the fallen was still drifting in the downtown air. Now, almost a decade and half later, the area has been completely transformed. “FiDi” is bustling under the new World Trade Center, opened the year Cozy was born. I had been to the memorial before, and it features in my 2015 novel, The Dream Police. But now it was all integrated into life in the city, a tourist destination.

I guided her to the places where the twin towers stood, now two deep fountains, ringed by the names of the thousands of people who died on another Tuesday morning. I told Cozy how, in 1987, when I was managing a band on Island Records, I would sit between the two towers and watch the commuters come out of the WTC subway station, work shoes in hand, and go up into the skyscrapers I first saw in the 1976 version of King Kong. Then I started to choke up and had to step back for a second to collect myself.

There’s no way to convey the horror of that day so I just told her a few details. I told her about the people who chose to jump to their death rather than burn to death and the sound of bodies crashing to the ground. I told her about Fight 93 and the passengers who crashed their own plane to stop it from being used as a missile into the Capitol Building. I told her about the hundreds of firefighters who were buried alive trying to rescue those trapped in the towers. And I sobbed. I’m sobbing as I’m writing this.

Since September 11, 2001, two billion people have been born on this planet. To them, 9/11 is a story from history, like Pearl Harbor is to me. Cozy will study in greater detail. I was 37 on that day. Maybe when she’s 37, in 2051, she’ll have something worse than 9/11 to weld her to history. I hope not. But when she does learn more about it, I want her to picture herself in that spot in Manhattan, filled with real people and two holes in the ground. I want her to remember the sound of my voice as it cracked.

I wonder what her perspective on that day will be in 2051.  Will she remember the pointless wars it produced that took so many more lives? Will she remember the hate crimes that spiked after the attack and the Patriot Act that started to roll back our liberties. Or will she tell a story about how a divided nation found something to bring people together? Both can be true but I think the latter is more of the myth we tell ourselves about 9/11.

After the attacks, I had a recurring nightmare about being in the WTC subway station during the attack. The station begins to fill with water from all the broken water mains above and dead bodies float by me as I try to escape. That area is now the futuristic shopping mall called “Oculus.” We both were amazed at the open design with the subway stops adjacent to the shopping area. Cozy and I stopped by the Apple store where I bought a phone case, replacing my nightmare with some well-lit retail therapy.  It felt strangely healing.

She will learn more about that day; the ugly, the bad, and the good. Maybe, at some point, I’ll be ready to visit the museum and I can tell her more stories of that time, again through tears. I have so many memories, but it’s her story to discover now. I’ll tell her how I flew on 9/10 (with a camping knife in my bag) and, after the attacks, how silent the sky was with no planes above. And she can fold the tenor of my voice in with her own role in witnessing the history she’ll live through. 

Elegy for a Land Line

~ Randy Blazak ~ 1 Comment

November 1, 2025

I was trying to respond to a message on Signal but I got a message that there was not enough space on my iPhone to open the app. So I had to find some old videos of the kid to delete and decide if I wanted to remove a few other apps I wasn’t actively using. Then I got a Facebook Messenger DM to respond to. As I was typing a response, another Messenger popped up. As I was deciding if I should finish the first message before answering the second one, my phone rang. It was a guy named “Michael” who wanted to talk to me about Medicaid A and B benefits. I wanted to be the lady in the commercial who just wanted to soak in the bathtub.

Electronic media has countless dark sides. Countless. One is the massive wave of stimuli that we are duty bound to respond to, from emails to TikTok comments. I spend a large chunk of each day deleting junk emails so I don’t have a panic attack every time I open my inbox. And a good percentage of those are emails I should read, but it’s just too much to process. And now that I have reached the status of “Influencer” on Instagram, I get hundreds of messages everyday, almost all incredibly supportive, or sharing a video I NEED TO WATCH. I try to respond to as many as I can, but I will occasionally get the indignant follower, offended that I was too whatever to respond. Where is my time?

And don’t get me started on the constant spam calls I get. Sometimes I’ll get a spammer calling while I’m on the phone with another spammer, all trying to separate me for my money. I’m getting better at not picking up but I do enjoy messing with them and seeing how long I can keep them on the line.” “Hello, my name is Michael and I’m calling about the new Medicaid benefits. How are you?” “Oh, I’m OK, Michael, but I’m suffering from a blocked colon. Do you think you’ll be able to help me? With my blocked colon?” Click.

All this has got me in the dreaded “Good ol’ days” funk that I typically warn against. Here we go. When was a kid, there was one phone in the house that was connected to the house by a chord. There was no call-waiting. If someone called while you were on a call, they got a busy signal and had to try later. That was it. No email. No texts. No DMs. If you didn’t have their phone number, you had to write a letter. On one side, we were more isolated from immediate conversations, but on the other side, we were more isolated from immediate conversations.

As a 20th century boy I can remember what it was like to be away from that landline and be unreachable. We knew when the street lights came on it was time to go home. We could be present in the moment. My daughter, born in 2014, will never know what it’s like to be unreachable. To be truly unconnected and on your own. I’m a sociologist, not a psychologist, so I can’t say if that’s a bad thing or not, but I do know there is great value of calmness and being present in the moment and that’s hard to do with all the pings and beeps and calls from “Michael.” I could unplug for a day but then I’d be stressed about all the DMs and emails that were piling up. Maybe a nice power outage would calm my nerves.

I remember staring at the telephone and wishing it would ring. Be careful what you wish for.

Growing up with a K-Pop Kid

~ Randy Blazak ~ 1 Comment

October 2, 2025

Fifty years ago, I was 11 years old and somewhere between my Elton John phase and my Kiss phase. All the girls in my class were in their Bay City Rollers phase. Now I have an 11-year-old and she’s firmly in her K-Pop phase. Yeah, there’s a new Taylor Swift album out tomorrow but that pales in comparison to having every single incarnation of the new album by Stray Kids (available at Target). I know, because I’ve had to drive her there to get each version. “I’m spending my own money, Dad!” I laugh because I was right there, spending my chore money on Kiss posters.

Three thoughts.

Thought One: I love the evolution of music. If you would have asked me in 1975 what the pop music of 2025 might sound like, I never would have guessed the post-modern electro-clash of South Korean K-Pop groups. It’s like music from another planet. Just blast “Ceremony” by Stray Kids and tell me what you are listening to. But it’s infectious. Is it “noise” (Get out my yard, kids!) or a brilliant innovation of the pop music genre? The rock and roll ethic is youth music is supposed to set the younger generation apart from the older generation. My Dad’s parents hated Elvis and my dad hated Run DMC. I’m supposed to hate this music but I’m fascinated by it. Sorry, Cozy. I’m in.

Thought Two: I used to lecture about “teenybopper” culture in my Sociology of Youth Subculture class. About how research shows that the “culture of the bedroom” allows pre-teen girls to experiment with heterosexual norms of dating. I’m from the seventies, so their were a lot of girls buying Tiger Beat for the pin-ups of Leif Garret and Shaun Cassidy. Cozy’s Stray Kids box sets come with similar swag that ends up on her bedroom wall. Her and her friend screamed yesterday as they pulled out the pictures of the members of the boy band, including Hyunjin, who she declared was her “husband.” Classic teenybopper. How many women my age were sure they would marry Donny Osmond?

Thought Three: Music is such a great way to bond with your kid. Some families have sports, or religion, or animal husbandry. Our house has always been filled with an unhealthy obsession with music. Taking Cozy to see Taylor Swift last year was something we will both talk about for the rest of our days. Being present for her present K-Pop obsession is a great gift and she knows I appreciate it because I was in a similar spot. (There is more than one picture of me in Kiss make-up.) Andi and I took Cozy to see the film Demon Hunter at the theater and she sang every world. On the fourth of July, Cozy and her girl squad were crammed into my Subaru and they put “Gnarly” by KATSEYE on repeat and full volume and sang at the top of their lungs while they threw Snap n Pops at pedestrians. It was bliss.

Thanks to Facebook routinely reminding me, I am often lamenting over pics of Cozy the Toddler. Or Cozy the Second Grader. I posted a lot of pictures of her and that was a great part of her and my life. Cozy the Middle Schooler has all kinds of new joys to offer. Yeah, I want her to get off her phone and clean up her room (That’s another conflicting conflict to explore), but there is so much for me and this kid to learn about each other. Me at 11 was on my bike, her a 11 is on TikTok. We’re different people in different times. Me at 11 was obsessed with Watergate and my first trip to Washington, DC. Cozy is more than aware that Trump is threatening her country and her city, in particular, but she distances herself because her father is so invested in it, often asking why I spend so much time on the protest front line.

So the music connects us. The night she was born, I held her in my arms and sang, “Yellow Submarine.” I can imagine myself on my deathbed with her singing me some K-Pop tune from the 2020s. I asked her yesterday, “What do you think the music of 2075 will sound like, because you’ll be there?” She said, “Like robots.” I said, “That’s what I said 50 years ago.” We’re both right.

Raising a Daughter in Epstein’s America: Cozy Turns 11

~ Randy Blazak ~ 1 Comment

August 17, 2025

Eleven years ago today, I was driving west on the Sunset Highway like a bat out of hell. Andi was in labor and we had to find some place to have this baby. We had planned a natural birth in a bathtub birthing center, but our daughter Cozy had started to poke her head out and said, “Nope!” and was retreating back into the security of the womb. The nearest hospital had no room at the maternity inn, so my barely mobile wife, her mother, and the midwife hopped in the Prius and headed west. St. Vincent hospital was on the very edge of town and I was assured that it was still in Portland. This child would be born in Stumptown.

Fortunately, Cozette was born at 9:25 pm in Portland, Oregon, not Beaverton, during the second term of Barrack Obama. That night seemed like the most perfect exhausting evening on earth. Our daughter was here and the world was hers. Little did we know what was ahead.

I had hoped for a girl because I want to help put strong women into this world, who aren’t saddled with the marginalizing messages girls have typically gotten from their dads growing up. This was a feminist household. But easier said than done. We are always working against our patriarchal programing. And then came Donald Trump to make everything so much worse.

Cozy turned two during Trump’s first campaign for the White House. She was too young to hear the reports of the man who would be king bragging about grabbing women, “by the pussy,” and all the credible reports of sexual assaults by the alleged billionaire. (He still hasn’t released his taxes.) She never heard how he talked to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. (Although, she did put the ballot in the box for me and shouted, “Hillary!”)

Cozy was in first grade on January 6th and already knew Donald Trump was a very bad man. But it was his second term that made things the most challenging. The constant news coverage of Trump and his pedophile ring has just filled the air with the most disturbing sex talk. I can’t even listen to NPR with her in the car. But she already knows it all.

At 10, I got my puberty memo, so I knew Cozy was already in the zone. I bought a supply of menstrual pads for when it officially gets here, but the fact that the style among her and her friends is the visible bra strap means we’re fully in it. I knew it was coming, just not this soon. And now the normal relatively innocent adolescent sex chat has been colonized by the flood of chat about Epstein’s rape of underage girls and the protection of those fellow child rapists by the President of the United States.

I keep flashing back to the days when the GOP was the “party of values” and rich Republican ladies would clutch their pearls over the lyrics in rap music. Now the GOP has become the Guardians of Predators and I’m doing everything I can think of to protect my child from them. We’ve hit the point where children are safer with priests than they are with Republicans. It’s a race to the bottom with Trump, and the old man is in a full on sprint.

Maybe the whole “innocence of youth” thing is a myth. There are kids shooting up schools, after all. But I had a naive hope that I could save my daughter from the reality of our sick culture that elevates rapists and refuses to punish wealthy white sex predators for a few more years. She knows she’s a target. There’s no way in hell I would leave my daughter alone in a room with the President or any of his uber creepy MAGA cult. (Many of Trump’s white nationalist following believes the age of consent should be 14 so men can marry children, so there’s that.)

If there’s any silver lining to this disgusting state of affairs, is that Trump’s rape culture has forced us to talk to our daughter about sexual safety early and often. And Cozy is clear on her boundaries. She’s already shut a classmate down who sent an inappropriate text. It’s horrible at age 10 she had to but she knows how to protect herself. But the other side is the non-stop sexual content she must see as she endlessly scrolls through her TikTok. I want to believe it’s all Taylor Swift but I know it’s mostly Sabrina Carpenter. Our baby is surfing in a sea of sexual messages, and not all are affirming.

Tonight, Cozy will celebrate her birthday with a big overnight party. They will want to keep me and any other adult at arms length. May they all be safe, happy, healthy and live with ease. Welcome to adolescence, Cozette. I am still here to protect you, but I’m going to let you start to lead.

Remembering My Brother Who Lived in the Woods

~ Randy Blazak ~ 3 Comments

December 14, 2024

My little brother and I never got a long very well. One time when I was 12 or 13, and he was my daughter’s age, we got into a big fight at our house in Stone Mountain, Georgia. He threw a tennis ball can at me that sliced open my forehead (I still have the scar). With blood pouring out my face, I smashed through the flimsy suburban house door of his bedroom and Ronnie jumped out of the second story window, escaping into the woods behind our house where he spent the next two nights. I remember my mother saying, “Let him. We’ll have some peace and quiet for a few days.” I can’t imagine feeling good about Cozy, 10, living in the woods for a few days, but my childhood home was a firestorm of sibling chaos.

Last Sunday, Cozy and I went to spend some time with Ron in his room in the assisted living facility where he’s been in hospice care for the last year. We brought him snacks from Safeway, including requested chocolate covered pretzels. We told him about our trip to Vancouver to see Taylor Swift and I promised to bring him some eggnog on Friday when I got back from a short work trip to Washington, DC.

Yesterday, I sat on his empty bed in his empty room, eating those pretzels and thinking about his body in a funeral home down the street. When we were leaving Sunday, he had a look of terror on his face. I think he knew we’d never see each other again. I tried to reassure him. “You’re gonna be OK. I’ll see you on Friday.” Now I wish I would have stayed a little longer. He died in his sleep Tuesday night. Finally free of the pain of cancer and the nightmares of demons dragging him to hell.

It’s a strange experience, losing a sibling. He drove me crazy for 57 years. I remember the day he came home from the hospital to our little house in Parma Heights, Ohio. My mother tried to head off the inevitable sibling rivalry by giving me a box of building blocks and saying that they were from the baby. But our life was only conflict. That included a 17-year stretch that I didn’t speak to him after he went to prison for threatening to kill our mother. After that, I thought I’d never speak to him again. Now, I find myself missing him. It’s a weird, dream-like state. Is that the same kid who threw the tennis ball can at me?

About 12 years ago, Ron became homeless, moving into the woods in Cartersville, Georgia, about an hour north of Atlanta. He found comfort in the woods, where he told me he talked to owls and ghosts. He was never what you would call a “people person,” challenged by the requirements of modern living. He had a job washing dishes at the local Applebee’s restaurant and would call me to lament his exclusion from our family, including his estrangement from his son. We slowly began to reconnect. On one visit, I took Ron back to our old neighborhood in Stone Mountain, and stopped by our elementary school. I could start to interact with him without the weight of the past and focus on the good memories of our childhood.

And there are good memories. We’d take family trips every summer, often to Florida or to Colorado, where my cousins lived. A favorite picture of us is at Disney World, 50 years ago. We’re on Mainstreet USA with Alice in Wonderland. I refused to hold her hand because, at 10, I thought girls had cooties. Ron, 7, had no hesitation. I use that picture to talk to my students about how straight people come out as well. Ron and I fought a lot but we also found great moments of joy on those road trips, so when I went to get him out of the Georgia woods last year to bring him to Portland, it was one more road trip for us.

Getting my brother situated was a challenge, he was so used to being alone in nature. Finding him housing (after a few rough weeks on my couch) and getting him to chemo appointments were a struggle. Fortunately, there was a great amount of support from my friends in a fundraiser that got him into a care facility. Eventually, he recognized hospice care made more sense although he often talked about “getting better” and building a cabin in the woods outside Knoxville, Tennessee, where he had visited. Our road trips got shorter, the Oregon coast, the Japanese Gardens in the West Hills, until finally he was bed bound, with the trees of Forest Park barely visible out of his window.

It is of great comfort to know my brother isn’t suffering anymore. Anal cancer is the worst thing you can imagine. “Why does it have to be in my ass,” Ron would say as I’d deliver his opioids from the Safeway Pharmacy. It was excruciatingly miserable and he’d often wish he was back in his tent in Cartersville. “I’ll drive you to the airport if you want,” an older version of me would say, annoyed that he didn’t appreciate having a roof over his head and access to legal weed. But I knew Ron was doing me a favor by letting me play the caring older brother role I’d failed to as a kid.

Today, I will deliver his prayer shawl to the funeral home for him to be cremated with and a note expressing gratitude for letting me take care of him. In the coming year I will take his ashes back to Georgia and spread them in the woods where he found his peace. Fittingly, there are no photographs of all the times we fought, just of us in times of happiness. I’ll let that record be the memory of my little brother.

Make America Classic Rock Again? The Political Danger of Nostalgia

~ Randy Blazak ~ 1 Comment

March 5, 2024

I had a dream I turned on the classic rock radio station and heard a song I never heard before. I woke up thinking how boring nostalgia was. As much as I love a good Steve Miller Band single from 50 years ago, there has to be something more to life. Thanks to my 9-year old Swiftie daughter, the car radio is now locked into the Top 40 station. Z100! I know Steve Miller and his Jet Airliner are still there, but we’re in a droptop ride with SZA today.

I’ve now entered the age where I’m surrounded by peers, Baby Boomers and increasingly crotchety Gen Xers, complaining about “kids today” and how much better things were back in the day, music and values and the price of gas. It’s endlessly annoying. Just because Van Halen made “totally awesome” music in 1980, doesn’t mean there aren’t a ton of bands making great music now. (I’m writing this as I’m playing the new Bleachers record.) But I’m regularly being beaten over the head by Grumpy Old Men who don’t think any music released this century is worth a damn. They desperately want the world be like it was when they were young and you could ride in the back of a pick-up truck to the drive-in.

Let’s first deal with three important facts.

FACT 1: I love when I read old timers complain that youth today have no morals or respect or blah, blah, blah. They forget that their parents’ generation said the same thing about them. Kids have never had any goddamn respect. Socrates, over 2400 years ago said much the same thing. “The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.” They might be assholes half the time, but the kids are alright. 

FACT 2: Rock and roll was created in the 1950s for one specific reason, to annoy your parents. The noise of youth creates space for young people separate themselves from adult society. Adults thought Elvis was noise in the 1950s, with his gyrating hips and “negro intonations.” Every year kids have had something to push their parents back, including Hendrix (1960s), Kiss (1970s), Run DMC (1980s), Nirvana (1990s), Eminem (2000s), Beyoncé (2010s), and Doja Cat (now). I remember my father endlessly perplexed at why I preferred Led Zeppelin to Ricky Nelson. “That’s not music,” was the constant refrain. “I hope I die before I get old,” I’d reply. I remember elders thinking Van Halen was absolute garbage when they came out. (I saw them get booed when they opened for Black Sabbath in 1978.) Now grandma and grandpa are in a heated Sammy Hagar versus David Lee Roth debate.

FACT 3: The past always looks great through the rear view mirror, but the past was always a mixed bag. Yeah, it was fun to ride around in the back of a pick-up truck, but a bunch of kids fell out and died. Yeah, there were some great songs back then but there were some super shitty ones, too. Does anyone really miss “Disco Duck”? Yeah, it was fun to play in the streets with your pals, but often you were playing “Smear the Queer.” Whenever someone waxes on and on about the dreamlike good old days, I flash to me holding the TV antenna in just the right position so I could watch the Watergate hearings on one of the three channels we got, while also trying to manage the horizontal hold. I’ll take my Roku, thank you.

Nostalgia was originally defined as a sickness in the 1680s to describe Swiss mercenaries who couldn’t fight because the longed for home. During the American Civil War, nostalgia was seen as a problematic form a depression, melancholia to be cured so the soldiers could wage war. It’s root as a mental disability is not lost on the lives of those suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, endlessly caught in loops of their past, unable to engage in the present world in a meaningful way. “If I could just go back to when I was happy.” Odds are you weren’t as happy as you imagine.

There’s a dangerous political aspect to all this hyper-nostalgia, this over romanticizing of the past. It’s the impetus behind all forms of fascism, from Hitler’s mythologizing of Germany’s past or Trump’s Make America Great Again movement. For Trump’s crowd it’s the belief that America was great BEFORE all the various civil rights movements upset the “natural” authority of straight white cis-gender men. The America before pronouns, diversity trainings, and black lives mattering. Make America Jim Crow Again. It’s not surprising that Trump has leaned heavily on 20th century music artists to take his MAGA crowd back to the GOD (Good Old Days). It’s encouraging that dozens of these artists (or their estates) have petitioned Trump to stop using their music, including Aerosmith, The Beatles, Bruce Springsteen, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Eddy Grant, Elton John, the Village People (!), Everlast, Guns N Roses, Isaac Hayes, The Smiths, Leonard Cohen, Linkin Park, Neil Young, Ozzy Osbourne, Phil Collins, Prince, Queen, R.E.M., The Rolling Stones, Tom Petty, and even Nickelback. Just this week, the estate of Sinead O’Connor asked Trump to stop using her version of “Nothing Compares to You.” Fascism requires nostalgia but they are not doing it with Nickelback!

Two Important Points

Number 1: I get nostalgia. When we are young, and the world is in front us, every new experience is massively vibrant, the first kiss, the first time listening to Dark Side of the Moon. Those experiences and their soundtrack are woven into our very construction, like the iron beams that hold up the Empire State Building. Sitting in a smoke field movie theater watching The Empire Strike Back or falling to sleep to Steely Dan on the FM headphones has been fused into our DNA. As we age, and more of our life is behind us instead of in front of us, we start to lean on those iron beams. The Empire State Building, built 93 years ago, might not be here 93 years from now (2117), but it will always remind us of a specific moment in history that was both “great” and horrible.

I can get caught up in nostalgia, just like everyone else. I currently have 955 public playlists on Spotify, most mining the music of my youth. (Playlist #956 is going to be songs from albums released in March 1974, starting with Grand Funk’s “Locomotion.”) If I have any actual hobbies, it’s collecting vinyl LPs and anything related to the Beatles. And I would trade my eye teeth to get behind the wheel of my first car, a ’73 Gran Torino, again. But that brings me to Point #2.

Number 2: Nostalgia can block out our ability to be present in the present. We’re so focused on the past and making America “that” again, we miss out on the wonderful stuff right in front of us. I will never stop listening to Top 40 radio and looking for new bands to obsess over. (Currently, it’s Blood Command.) I love sharing my daughter’s love of all things Taylor Swift and discovering this music with her (Lover is our current favorite album, although I’m starting to get into folklore.) Listening to contemporary music connects me to the present moment, not when America Was Ricky Nelson. Even if for a moment, it liberates me from the endless nostalgia loop. And it’s inevitable that Taylor Swift will be on “oldies” rotation in 30 years and my kid will say, “When I was a kid, we had REAL music, like Dua Lipa. These kids today…” And so it goes.

So enjoy the past. There’s great wisdom in a Crosby, Stills, and Nash lyric and a Jimmy Carter foreign policy. Huey Lewis and Ronald Reagan don’t seem as horrid as they did 40 years ago. And some of our fond memories are shockingly marginalizing now. (If you can’t remember how racist, sexist, and homophobic we were, just watch any 80’s comedy film. Weird Science has not aged well.) But also plug into the present reality. The kids today have both the exact same issues we contended with and so much more. And their world is reflected in their culture, which should not be dismissed as our parents dismissed ours. Their soundtrack is worth a listen.

On Turning 60 in an Ageist Culture

~ Randy Blazak ~ 4 Comments

February 19, 2024

Life is timeless, days are long when you’re young

You used to fall in love with everyone

Any guitar and any bass drum

Life is a drink and you get drunk when you’re young

– “When You’re Young” by The Jam (1978)

Here’s what I remember about being 29 years old. Being in a panic for 12 months, that the youth culture, that I had pledged allegiance to, was about to kick me off the boat. I sat in an Atlanta cafe (Café Diem) and kept a journal chronicling my desperate attempt to stranglehold youth before I was put into the “Don’t Trust Anyone Over 30” lane. The morning of my 30th birthday I woke up, wrung out in New Orleans, and realized I was the exact same person as the was the day before.

For most of our time on earth human beings have been clueless at the concept of birthdays and even their own age. Joan of Arc could only guess that she was 19 when she was put on trial for heresy in 1431. Cave people didn’t say, “Well, I’m a Virgo, that’s why this cave is so damn clean.” Birthdays are a modern invention and we put a lot of significance on them as meaningful moments of transition. But was 37 really that different from 36?

I say this because tomorrow I turn 60, which is either massively monumental or completely meaningless. I can’t decide. Sixty sounds really old. Or it sounded really old when I was 20, forty years ago. In 1984. During the Reagan administration. Before the internet. When you had to remember people’s phone numbers. To my students, all born in the 21st Century, I must be Methuselah. But I don’t feel old at all, just wise. Like Methuselah.

We live in an incredibly ageist society that has long devalued people who are above the mean age. Look at how Joe Biden, 81, is being aged out of competency. Biden is the same age as Mick Jagger (and only 3 years older than Trump, who, under that badly dyed mop on his head, is just another grandfather) and has done a pretty good job of pulling the country out of the ditch Trump drove it into. Age was once associated with invaluable experience and now it’s a measure of how good you are not at updating apps. Maybe Biden needs a Trump wig and spray tan.

I dread having to check boxes on questionnaires that say “Age: 60+,” but I’m pretty much the same guy I’ve always been. I love new music when it’s loud. I despise nostalgia and I’m still making sure I my exercise outweighs my excess. Maybe I lucked out holding on to my hair, unlike my dad. Will I be disregarded now that I’m 60? As a Gen X elder, I’ve got waves of Millennials and Gen Y whippersnappers to tell me how disconnected I am. My old stories don’t carry the same clout in the TikTok era. Nobody cares that I hung out with Bono. Have you seen Bono’s face lately? (Someone should tell the Irish about SPF.)  But as even craggier Ron Wood sang, “We all get old.” (Footnote: Ron Wood is in the Rolling Stones with Mick Jagger who Kesha sang about. Ask your mom about Kesha.)  Where do I fit in the AARP world where nobody retires and where this 60-something will be buying the new Taylor Swift album the day it comes out?

The difference between now and then (cue Beatles song), is the life lessons we are lucky to collect along the way. I have no way of really remembering my life at 20. It’s filtered through all the experiences in the 40 years that connect those two points in time. I can’t remember what it was like to hear the Replacements in 1984 because I think about it in relation to the 40 years of other things I’ve heard since my friend Tim put their Let It Be album on his turntable. All those moments of youth are similarly filtered. But I do know I’ve learned some things (and forgotten more).

So if Randall at 60 was to zip back to Randy at 20 and give him three nuggets, this is what I’d share with him.

First would be to be a sponge. To stop and soak up the moment. We are super shitty at being “present” in this life, always looking ahead. So I would tell him to try this exercise I created. I call it “5 Senses 5 Moments,” and it goes like this:

Stop and take a moment to be in the moment by doing these 5 things. 1. Close your eyes and listen to the sounds of the space you are in. What’s the ambient background noise? Can you hear others breathing? 2. Look around you and let your eyes settle on one thing. It could be the complex pattern of a brick or the way a plant sways in the breeze or the hair of the person next to you. 3. Open your mouth and take a gulp of air. What do you taste? This morning’s coffee? 4. Smell the air of the space you are in. What do you notice and where is it coming from? 5. Lastly, find a surface around you to touch and notice. It could be the texture of your pants or the warmth of your forearm. How does the air feel on your skin? (I’d like to thank Yoko Ono, whose 91st birthday was yesterday, for helping my brain to work this way.)

I wish I had taken more moments in my life to stop and smell the roses. It was moving so fast and I missed a lot. Now I stop. There is beauty in the present moment.

The second thing would be to remind Young Randy is that he lives in the world with other people, they are not just passing through his world, in Randyland. American youth culture fosters narcissism. It was all about me and the performance of coolness. I read Walt Whitman in the early 80’s as a license to celebrate myself at the expense anyone I was close to.  But I only exist in tandem with others so I should have been more curious about their lives. I thought I was in a movie starring me, but I was also bit player in their stories.

And the third thing would be to stay away from credit cards. Pay in cash. Much worse than being broke is being in debt.

When I think of how I spent my time 40 years ago, much of it was rooftops, or on my Vespa racing to the top of parking decks, with a girl on the back, to take in the steaming skyline of the city. I spent so much energy trying to find the nooks and crannies in their world to inhabit. An abandoned warehouse that was a brief punk rock refuge or a back alley that we could spray paint our hopes and dreams on. Now my energy goes to transform my own spaces, including the world my child will inherit. I’m not afraid of 60. I now have the resources to help create the reality I wanted to see when I was young.

Yeah, at 60 there is more behind you than ahead of you, but there is still plenty ahead. I’m excited to see what’s next.