Morbid thoughts

I found myself feeling a bit depressed today over the death of Denny Doherty. I'm not sure why. As far as I'm concerned, the Mamas and the Papas are among the more forgettable short-lived musical acts to come out of the 1960's, but the realization that three out of the original four are dead just drove home the fact that yes, the generation that hoped it would die before it got old is getting old and dying anyway.

I'm not sure when this all started. It may have been noticing how stiff I am when I get out of bed in the morning if I don't stretch. It may be that the weight which was always hard to lose under the best of circumstances has become completely intractable, despite my best efforts to purge milk chocolate, anything with high fructose corn syrup, trans fats, and/or white flour from my life, watch portion size, and try to get as much exercise as possible given a busy schedule. Maybe it was Dennis Hopper doing retirement plan commercials, or Paul McCartney looking like a haggard old man in the tabloid photos, or Phil Lesh being diagnosed with prostate cancer, or Mick Jagger's upper arms flapping around like wings during last year's Superbowl half-time show, or James Brown dropping dead at 73 with his title of the hardest working man in show business still intact.

I found myself wondering how many of my generation's pop culture idols are going to pay a premature price for the lifestyle they lived when they were young. And I wondered whether this generation, which extended adolescence beyond any reasonable time, is going to become ridiculous -- or perhaps we're already there.

Author Tim Sandlin seems to think so, for he has published a book entitled Jimi Hendrix Turns Eighty. The premise is loaded with potential: a bunch of Woodstock generation types in an assisted living center. It sounds like it could be fun, doesn't it?

Perhaps not. As reviewer Neal Genzlinger says:

He was almost certainly hoping to create an endearingly irascible and eccentric bunch of rebels, the kind of people Walter Matthau and George Burns and Martha Raye would play in the film version if they were still alive. Instead he inspires a single, admittedly harsh thought: anyone still listening to Procol Harum in 2022, when this novel is set, is no longer welcome here.

Imagine the navel-gazers of The Big Chill, for my money one of the most overrated, cliché-ridden, pieces of cinematic crap this side of Terms of Endearment in their seventies and eighties. It's enough to make you think Roger Daltrey knew what he was talking about in "My Generation".

I've written before about how every generation feels that it is special, and that kind of horn-tooting looks insufferable to both the generation before and the one after. But one thing is for certain. No matter which generation you identify with: whether we're aware of it on any given day or not, whether we want to think about it or not, and as much as we believe that somehow we'll be different, that somehow, despite all evidence to the contrary; WE won't get old, WE won't kvetch about our aches and pains and bladder problems and prostate and hot flashes and bunions and plantar fasciitis, and WE will somehow find a way to be fabulous, the bottom line is that we all end up taking the same journey. And the best we can hope for is to not embarrass ourselves too much along the way.