If You're 30, You're Kind of Old

I totally stole this idea from another blog/site, but here are some things that personally make me feel old. Enjoy!

1) If your birthday is in 1981-

20 years before you born, The Beatles had yet to put out an album.

20 years ago this week, Nirvana's Nevermind had already sold a million copies.

2) It's been a decade since Will Ferrell has been a cast member on Saturday Night Live. Unfortunately, whenever someone still mentions the word fever, someone else will always have to mention the word cowbell too.

3) Magic Johnson has had HIV for 20 years. He will probably outlive me.

4) Six years from now, the first year model of the Volkswagen New Beetle will be considered a "classic car." Also six years from now, if you own one or have ever owned one, you will be considered a "classic closeted homosexual."



5) U2's first major label album came out 32 years ago. They also entered a Battle of the Worst Band Name Ever and nobody has come close since, although Radiohead, Coldplay, and Butthole Surfers did the best they could.

6) "Mutt Cutts" and "I Got Worms" have been out of business for 17 years. Rhode Island bull-shiht and nightcrawler populations are in decline.

7) If Calvin had aged, he would now be 32 years old. And probably addicted to Adderall. And probably pissing on the West Virginian entrepreneur who created the stickers of him pissing on pickup truck logos. Also Hobbes would be dead (average lifespan of a tiger in captivity- 16-20 years).

8) It's been 16 years since O.J. Simpson was found not guilty. He's been doing his best to get to jail since then (tax evasion, assault charges, drug dealing), but thanks to Milton Bradley and their short-sighted business practices, they forgot to put expiration dates on their Monopoly cards. It's also mind-boggling that other defense lawyers don't know this.

9) The word MILF has been in the English vocabulary for 12 years. Douchebags have been around longer, with no signs of extinction.

10) The New Kids on the Block broke up before Justin Bieber was even born. (Sorry this was a terrible one).

11) Clarissa hasn't had any explanations since 1994. Probably because any teenage explanation is generally pointless.

And one bonus:

12) The two biggest hip-hop artists ever (in terms of albums sold), Jay-Z and Kanye West, released "Watch the Throne" in August. It has only sold 1 million copies after five months. Eighteen years ago, The Jerky Boys first "album" ever was serendipitously released right before caller I.D., and sold 2 MILLION copies. Of phone calls. Like the "hilarious" clip below.

The Maddening Men of Mad Men (and why I stopped watching it)

It was a pretty easy trap to fall into. Like many men of my generation (X or Y or maybe Z?), we've realized the words of Tyler Durden are never more true, in that we're a generation of men raised by women. In other words, men not raised by men. Many of us striving for manhood have to figure out what the hell we're doing when 43% of us don't have a steady father figure. Luckily I have had that, but as a culture, many of us have not. And in a country where the average one of us watches 28 hours of television a week, we find our examples through the magnifying glass of an HDTV, filled to its borders with mediocre sitcoms, trash reality shows, and over-hyped sporting events.

I needed someone to save me from it all.

Prime-time sitcoms certainly weren't doing it for me. We're told that a forty-year old man whose best friends are a laugh track and a wardrobe of 32 bowling shirts can lay girl after girl and not be considered a) ridiculous or b) creepy. Until his personal life becomes the lowest common denominator that his fake life always was. Likewise, we have men who in any other period of our country would actually be contributing to society, getting plastered and arrested on a New Jersey beach and getting paid millions of dollars to do it, because really, we want them to do that. And in a sport where young men are glorified as young gods, we act appalled when they celebrate excessively, but will watch repeat episodes of SportsCenter that highlight the obnoxious, selfish, and unsportsmanlike behavior.

To rebound from all that, we overcompensate on the definition of a man and forget the irony of Fight Club, so that the fastest growing sport in America is one where men cover themselves in tribal tattoos and attempt to brutalize another person in an octagon cage. Flip the coin, and even those of us who strive to escape the man-boys around us end up having to schedule a month in which to grow a beard and watch YouTube videos on our iPads on how to change a tire. I'm not judging, I'm part of this 99 percent. I read Esquire on my iPhone, through Twitter, to read a recipe, in a section called "How to Eat Like a Man." While eating Oreos and milk. I'm still a boy.

We're all still boys, and in this decade we needed a savior, someone who wasn't our father, but could teach us to act like how our father was or always wanted to be.

In came the good ship Mad Men, a vessel that could finally rescue us from the circling sharks of bumbling sitcom husbands swarming off the tequila drenched shores of Bro Jersey. At its helm, the no-nonsense, pressed-suit wearing, Old-Fashioned downing Don Draper- a breath of fresh, secondhand, Lucky Strike air.

At first glance, Don Draper is the quintessential man. In the last few years, he single-handedly revived classic cocktails, showed American men how to wear suits without looking like a Vegas casino manager but without looking like a Brooklyn hipster, and destroyed every anti-tobacco campaign by smoking cigarettes like they were a healthy three square meals. New York City, the greatest city in the world, is lucky to have him. For God's sakes, he works in an office and loves it (of course, having Joan Holloway around helps). He demands respect from other people who demand respect. And he gets that respect. He's the textbook modern man.

That's how I fell into the trap. One episode in, I was taking furious notes on how to be that person. Two and a half seasons in, I was taking notes on how to forget.

In the beginning, it was easy to love everything he embodied. Then there was a little cheating. But maybe it was just a mistake. Then there was a lot of getting wasted and showing up to work hungover. But maybe he'd pull it together. Then there was being a terrible father. Maybe he'd wake up. But he continued to embrace his shovel of increasing power and wealth, and continued to dig a bigger and bigger hole into his life, without any remorse whatsoever.

So I started pulling things away from him, to see where he'd stand without his assembly line of cocktails, clever quips, and tailored suits. At that point, he suddenly became a mere boy to me. A boy somewhere in between adolescence and adulthood. That period where we begin to make so many serious mistakes (i.e. drinking WAY too much, wrecking cars, breaking someone's heart), but are still allowed to learn from them before we're catapulted into our careers, marriages, and adult life in general. The problem with Don Draper is that his life is a spin-cycle of that period, without ever moving forward. On most nights, when he can embrace the childhood of his kids, he prefers to indulge in the pleasure of excessive drinking and/or excessive adultery. When he can embrace his long-lost brother, he disowns him. When he can repair the marriage that he wrecked without regard to his entire family, he runs away to California. At every turn, change seems inevitable (because who can go on living like that?), but it never comes. While everything except his job continues to crumble, he blissfully ignores the consequences his actions have on others, and the repercussions never come.

In the end, those repercussions, and what we learn from them, are what make us men. As weak as it is, we only become our best when the imperfections of our life and the process in which we learn from them begin to patch one hole after another until hopefully we're only a slow-leaking sieve. I am surely not perfect. I have enjoyed too many a cocktail too many a time, and it does not make me a man. It makes me want to eat Burger King the next day, but it does not make me a man. What makes me a man is what happens in the moments when it's me against myself, not me against Johnny Walker. Instead of entertaining thoughts of other women, I try my best to divert them towards the woman I love, who unconditionally loves me back. I try to avoid vices, and many times find myself resorting to them, but I at least know where I am and know where I need to go to, and that is reassuring.

As far as Don Draper and the rest of Sterling Cooper go, I couldn't keep watching the show as they all continued to free-fall through a life of unchecked balances. I wanted to believe in him and his co-workers as men, but the outstanding lack of remorse in the show made me stop.

For now, I'll stick to re-runs of Friday Night Lights and Coach Eric Taylor, or the upcoming season of The Walking Dead and Sheriff Rick Grimes. They're the best we've got going for us.

We're still a generation of lost men wandering around in a desert, trying to find water in anything that will moderately resemble manliness. I don't know if we'll ever find that fountain of post-youth. It may be that our relief will only come through holding onto virtue and knowing that while we will forever fail in most of our endeavors, we try to be better. That's all I ever wanted from Don Draper. Just try to be better. Be just, be upstanding, and be honest. But he never delivered.

That said, after going on about this for a whole essay, I suppose I should practice what I preach. To be honest, the real reason I stopped watching Mad Men is because it makes me want to smoke every cigarette in the whole wide world. And I don't have enough money to buy all of them.

The Real Housewife (and Dad) of Grantville PA

I remember my dad telling me once, "Get an education and a good job that you love. I never had that and for 30 years I've had to work in a factory. I don't like my job, but I do it to support the family." So many things can be taken from that sentence- hope and dignity, sadness and regret. But what I take most from it is honor. In a world increasingly filled with Kardashians and Unreal Housewives, I feel honored that when I look into the deepest parts of me, at the building blocks of my core, I know that somewhere along the line I have become a man who knows the value of work, and of hard work, and of sacrifice. And that I've learned those lessons from my parents, who may not have a degree from college, but who have several doctorates from the University of Life. As I stand at the crossroads of my life (cue Bone Thugs...seriously, find it in your iTunes library and cue it), I realize I've been blessed with the best cartographers to chart the map that will guide me through rocks and shoals, and without them and their example, I would surely be lost at sea.

In a few months, merely a week after I turn 30, I will be married to a person that I love, someone who is the holy to my ghost, the sharpness to my notes, the Beebop to my Rocksteady. During this tidal wave of change, I have been on a crash course of life lessons that have caused me to look inside of me and see the parts that comprise the core of my being. Among the things I have uncovered with my late-twenties microscope is that that I will sacrifice anything for those who I love. I have realized that even if it means working a job that I don't like at the moment, it's at least a job, and it's at least making some money to pay down debts so that I can take better care of my family in the future. I have realized that cleaning up raw sewage in a basement of a restaurant while getting paid $3.60 an hour isn't very dignifying, but realizing that I have the power to learn from that job and work even harder at it- if only to be an example to my managers and those around me- is dignifying. And that having so many people around me who I love and love me back unconditionally is a luxury in life, and I will do anything to protect that and ensure that for many years to come.

These are lessons that I have learned, but that I realize I've always known. Because for 18 years of my life, they were in front of me every day. They were there when my dad would come home from work, and instead of being like his dad and drinking the night or weekend away, he changed his family tree by taking me to every baseball game or soccer game of my youth. And let's be honest- unless there's an America's Funniest Video bat-to-the-crotch type moment, those games are not exciting. I never had Teddy Ruxpin, Reebok Pumps, or Nintendo. I never got closer than in front of my grandparents' cable television to being on Nickelodeon's Global Guts. But I did have a mom who hauled me and my three to seven friends around in the back of a Chevy Caprice station wagon to wherever we wanted to skateboard, like every day of the summer. Or who sat in the car for two hours until about one in the morning waiting for me to leave a Joy Electric concert, rather than coming in and dragging me out of there, because that was my favorite band at the moment (it was a weird "finding my identity" phase). Looking back, I don't remember most of those other kids' parents picking us up even once.

Every week, my mom would clean our house. Every other day, my mom would clean other people's houses, a lot of them people who she knew. I know from experience that when you're in that type of a position, there's not too much dignity in that work, unless you're doing it to reach a goal. And every day, my mom would cook a meal for us. Not microwave dinners, or McDonald's, or frozen pizzas. Freaking home-cooked meals. She was the the most Real Housewife ever. And reason number 763 why kids are and always will be stupid- I would complain about things like lumpy mashed potatoes. Since then, in my mashed potatoes journeys, I realize that they're seriously the best mashed potatoes ever. And so that my mom could make "disgusting" mashed potatoes and hot chocolate with "not enough or too much" marshmallow and toast every morning for us, my dad worked like mad in a chocolate factory full of, well...factory workers (and they were not Oompa Loompas, although some were just as weird and scary). All of this so when we woke up and got home from school and went to bed, there was always a family.

We never went hungry cause we never went out to eat. We never were too cold cause my dad chopped a winter's worth of wood and would get up in the middle of the night to feed the stove. And we never were poor because we had everything that you can't buy at Toys "R" Us or the mall.

I am rich now because I was even more rich then. I see many people around me who have no idea how to act in life, who think that value is found in spending $100 at a bar and blacking out on a Monday night, or people protesting something they can't even define because they haven't found their way yet and surely that must be someone else's fault. I'm so lucky to have had parents that have shown me the value of work and how to make it work. And that in the end, enough really is enough, and the rest is just luxury.

I'm going to end this by showing why I don't deserve anything I've been given. One of the most heartbreaking moments of my life was a point when I was 13 or so, and my sister and I were being completely petulant about something stupid and I said something to my mom that clearly struck the most sensitive part of her. Something to the effect of her being a terrible mom. I remember the living room and the couch and the ceiling, but most of all I remember her face when her as a mom and her as a 33-year-old girl splintered in half and she just cried and said, "I do so much for you kids." In that moment, so much was said that wasn't said. I'm not sure what she thought when she was my age now, whether she held it together in those moments she was alone, the way she held it together in front of us for so many years until her first-born son broke her down with one ungrateful swoop of words. It's hard to feel much more awful after that kind of experience, and seventeen years later I'm still crying when I type this because it means more now to me than ever.

I can see so clearly the layered sacrifices that my parents shouldered day after day, to raise a family of four kids in a single floor three-bedroom ranch house, while having us feel that we never really wanted for much. I see how much was done and how the bar of life is set so high for me that I need a trampoline to get even within reaching distance. But I will try. I will set goals for me and for my family and I will run hard. Forever, I will hold fast to the way my parents gave me and my siblings the best childhood we could have with what they had been given, so that in the end, we would be given more.

To that extent, my cup overflows.

Rapture Freak Out

So the rapture became a crapture and it turns out those hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on billboards probably could have been better spent on things like, I don’t know- feeding orphans- as opposed to lining the war chest of Lamar advertising. I just wish I could’ve seen the parties being thrown by advertising execs on May 21st. I imagine water was being turned into wine at an alarming rate.


That said, I didn’t fear the end of the world at all on that day. Because I fear the end of the world every day.

Being raised in a ultra-conservative Evangelical household, I feared the rapture like I feared the rapists and killers on Unsolved Mysteries that I encountered every time I got to stay up late at the cable television paradise known as my grandparents’ house. It’s more than a little ironic that the rapture was supposed to be everything I should have anticipated as a good Christian, but I found it annoying that if it did occur, it would rob me of the rest of my life. It says a lot that I wouldn’t want to miss out on a life consisting of things like looking forward to the Scholastic book fair or waiting all week long to watch TGIF until Uncle Jesse said “H-E-double hockey stick,” at which point my parents made me turn it off and go to bed.

That said, I felt that I had so much to live for before God popped down like a jack-in-a-box claw machine and plucked me into the foggy ether of heaven to make me play harps and sing with angels for, oh, only a billion forevers. It sounded about as appealing as a drum circle in the parking lot at a Dave Matthews concert. Anyway, I realized as a young child that if I was caught up into playing in the Everlasting Plastic Bucket Band, I was inevitably going to miss out on the greatest things this earthly life had to offer. More specifically, I would never be able to 1) play Major League Baseball, 2) have sex with a girl, 3) kiss a girl, and/or 4) talk to a girl. (Eighteen was a tough year.)

Church didn’t help my fear since a large mural in my Sunday School classroom had ghost-like wisps of people being caught up into the golden trumpeted clouds as chaos reigned below in the form of burning airplanes and highway car pile-ups (see above). My parents didn’t help my fear because my dad insisted on ending all sentences related to the future with the “if the Lord tarries” tagline (tarry means “wait.” I’m assuming nobody else knows this except Christians). Such as: “We can go to McDonald’s after we’re done shopping...if the Lord tarries.” And then I would just picture God as the Hamburglar, replacing my delicious french fries and cheap plastic toy down here with gross healthy foods like fruit up in “paradise.”

My parents kind of thought the world was going to end by the time I got to kindergarten, which may explain why I was allowed to ride without a seat belt in the back of a Plymouth Horizon whose door sometimes randomly opened while going around sharp turns. In any case, my kindergarten year was1987. In hindsight, it’s not that inconceivable that the world was going to end in the near future, seeing as if there was any decade to doubt the sanity of the human race, it was the 80’s. But then the 90’s came and people wore socks with Birkenstocks and we were still here. And then the 00’s came and the Red Sox actually won a World Series. Still here. And in the 10’s, I thought the most telling sign that the end might be near was when Susan Boyle sold like 10 million records in about a month. But apparently it takes a lot more than that, and even more than Rebecca Black becoming famous (if anyone forgets, she sang that song “Friday.” You can probably find it on YouTube).

And yet I’m still a little nervous.

Sometimes I’ll call three or four friends, as well as my parents’ house and nobody will pick up. And I picture all of them gone, off to have sex and hit walk-off home runs for all eternity while I’m left having to dodge falling stars and deal with rivers flowing with blood. I mean, in those situations, if someone gave me 1,000 to one odds on a dollar that they were taken into space, I would take it. Even though my money would be worthless cause a one world order would be instituted within the next year.

Exhibit two, just the other day I was at Kimi’s parents house and we were looking for them and they weren’t anywhere in the house (even though they were ten minutes earlier). Both their cars were in the driveway, and I promise there was an eerie silence hanging in the air as well. Most people’s natural reaction would be, “They’re probably outside.” Not me. Part of me was seriously thinking, “I’ve been left behind. I’m gonna find two piles of clothing, with no bodies. And we’re going to have to sell this house on a down market, not to mention that millions of other people will be gone, necessitating much less housing, so I’m even more screwed.” Turns out, they were outside. Crazy.

I don’t hold anything against my mom and dad, and they’re now a little more realistic about God’s plan for the human race, but it is a weird Pavlovian response for me to fear getting left behind by a God that I really do still love. At the same time, it’s kind of fun I guess. And I don’t know, maybe someday someone will be trying to call me and I’ll be the one who’s out of here. But really, I hope that when all this ends, God doesn’t just start picking people off, but that he brings wholeness and perfection to a pretty awesome world that’s already here.

And I’ll own Camden Yards and love Kimi well, literally forever.

This American Tour Life

Right now we're sitting in Nashville, waiting for our van to get fixed. For about the fifth or sixth time in our career, we shifted into broken-down mode with ease, pulled essentials out of the van and watched as unnamed AAA guy hooked us up and trailed our home into the distance, spilling money out of the side doors and into the hands of a local Ford dealership. Kind of like the way someone who gets pulled over all the time knows to reach for the license and registration, roll the window down and put the hands on the steering wheel, without the slightest uptick in their heart rate.

We were lucky enough to be broken down while with our best friends from The Young International, and were also fortunate that they let us borrow their trailer, while Relient K let us borrow their Suburban, so that we could make it for our two Indiana shows over the weekend.

So it's kind of a weird life, and not somewhere I imagined ten years ago, or even five years ago when I boarded onto this adventure. Most people my age are working jobs in the daytime, progressively moving forward. I feel like I'm moving forward, but in a quite zig-zag manner. However, without any of this I wouldn't be able to travel to a place like Nashville and meet up with 10 different friends, and sit on a back porch 'til five in the morning, recalling memories and dreams that we've all shared together and the struggles that only we've known. That said, I do miss home at times like these as well, and I do miss Kimi, and I hope that they can be distracted by their own lives so they can juggle mine while I try to navigate this skeleton of a destiny I've constructed over the last five years.

I hope those I love realize how much I appreciate their sacrifices and someday, when our van is rusted and in pieces in a junkyard somewhere, and our shirts and CD's are in thrift stores around the country, they'll still be there and vibrant and as much a part of me as this life I've been tracking down. Because this life is more than I could ask for, and the people I've been given are certainly more than that.

My Crack Addiction

My name is Robbe and I have an addiction. It's been known to kill. It is... crack. I've been sober for less than a day.

A couple months ago, I started a new job. For the record, it's job number 22 in my life. I'm trying to get to the golden job count, where the number of jobs coincides with my age. I'm fairly confident I'll accomplish that goal at some point in my life. Here's to goals!

That said, the job I've been doing is a blue-collar type of job, involving the replacement of water meters, both inside and outside and sometimes always outside. It's good I started the job at the beginning of winter. A lot of this job involves me crouching down, getting on my hands and knees, fixing things in holes, paying my pimp at the end of each shift...yeah. But really, it does involve pipes (okay I have no idea how to not make this job sound like an entire day's worth of that's what she saids) and fixing them and so on. So of course with this line of work, I have come to frequently encounter the wonderful world of plumber's crack.

Most of my past experiences with plumber's crack entails teenage me skateboarding with my friends, seeing someone working on their car, house, garden, etc. and yelling "crack kills!" as if the archangel Gabriel had just come down the day before and handed us the most clever one-liner ever known to mankind. I always thought it must have been so embarrassing for the person whose crack was exposed without them- surely!- knowing. I'd like to say the tables have turned, that I now find myself in a constant state of shame and anxiety at my hourly case of plumbers crack in full sight of pedestrians, school buses, drivers, etc.

However, it's quite the opposite.

For me, it has come to represent freedom. I'm not sure if it's because I assume it's part of my job, or if I just don't care about anything about my image anymore, but I am secure in knowing I can work on the side of a road and just let things go, without a honking horn or a clever quip swaying me from my path. It's almost like giving a finger to the world, because I assume when people see me doing my job outside when it's a toasty 5 degrees at 8 a.m., they're saying, "Wow, glad I'm not that guy." To that I say- my hands may be completely numb, my fingertips dried and split, my feet numb- but I'm not wearing a tucked-in dress shirt, nor a belt. Therefore, my crack may abound. And when crack abounds, a light air is constantly upon me, a cool breeze behind me, as if nature itself is patting me on my (lower) back, and saying, "Good job, this is how it's supposed to be. In you I am well pleased."

That is, of course, until it begins to rain outside.