Karl Klockars

I have been informed that I recently crossed the threshold of “30.”  This is apparently where one can choose between “acting immature” (read: still believing you’re 22) or becoming an “old crank.”  Considering the fact that I’ve been the aforementioned “old crank” since I was about 22, I haven’t noticed much change.

But the things that have started to slip into my life since entering this third decade of existence deserve to be noticed, heralded, feared, and documented. Whereas the series of blitherings called “The Married Guy’s Guide To Picking Up Chicks Women” ceased when I stopped looking at women as anything other than ambulatory hairless apes that occasionally wear sunglasses, YOU’RE (Effing) OLD can continue endlessly.  Well, it’ll end.  Hopefully not for at least 6 more decades or tho.

It was just a few months ago that the wife looked at the side of my head and immediately started giggling.  While I wiped the side of my skull, hunting for the booger or piece of gum dangling from my head (what else could be that funny?) my wife reached over, yanked out a couple strands of hair and showed them to me.

“You’re distinguished!” she sputtered out in between hysterical and humiliating peals of laughter.  It was grey.  For about 15 minutes I was bothered – then I decided that I would embrace it and hope that I’d end up with hair akin to Paulie Walnuts from the Sopranos.  I’ve learned to make peace with the change.  Life happens.

Part of that life experience is the kind of thing that the white bread, domesticized entertainment that the punk rock/metal kid with facial piercings and combat boots version of me never could have imagined.  For gods sake, I baked cornbread last night.  But this isn’t about random bread creation.  This is about the advance of age and the things you do with it.  Damnit, we’re into the Dinner Party phase of our lives.

What used to be the “call 10 friends, fire up the Weber kettle and drink 30 Busch Lights” social gathering, now involves 45 minutes spent on Epicurious.com and figuring out where to source your red snapper from.  And, naturally, ten years ago there would be an obvious “where to source your red snapper from” joke here but now I’m not touching that with a ten-meter cattle prod.  (Bodily functions will remain amusing until the end of time, tho – don’t worry.)

There was a point in time where I was in a huge hurry to get old.  I moved into a responsible apartment, planned on having pool parties and barbecues and playing frisbee and doing the responsible early-2os “I’m not a total scumbag, right?” kind of thing.  And what happened was that I moved into the responsible apartment and stayed a meathead.

The dinner party was always the sitcom plot point early in the first season where the middle-aged / newlywed couple had the neighbors over for dinner and hilarity ensued.  Or it was the time as kids when you get hotdogs and mac n’ cheese for dinner while mom dresses up and drinks wine, then shoves you into the basement for a few hours.  Now it’s when I’m rushing home to flex my culinary muscle, to try to accomplish feats of food amazement on no budget and in zero time.  It’s Top Chef with no cameras but a much more palpable sense of time passing.

It’s a milestone.  It’s a rite of passage.  You only do this when you’re far enough along in your life to have 4 dishes that match, glasses that didn’t get purchased at a gas station, and maybe you know enough about wine to not buy a bottle of Night Train.  And here we go.

On the way home from work, I’ve been re-reading Motley Crue’s “The Dirt,” which is just about the greatest book ever written about rock and roll and practically a bible for my idiot friends and myself.  I’ve cruised through the first couple hundred pages, and was just getting to the beginning of the depths of the rock-star-junkie portion of the plot when the El dropped me off at Rockwell.  As I burned through a final couple paragraphs discussing sex, heroin, sex, rock and roll, liquor, celebrity, money, sex, motorcycles, music and sex, I pulled a handful of paper from the back of the book as bookmark – and looked down and saw it was the recipe sheets I’d printed off at work.

From debauchery in Hollywood to deglazing a sautee pan.  You’re Effing Old.

Further entries to come in this series include “Your pants are too high,” “Your eyebrows are too bushy,” “Somethings just don’t work anymore” and “Haven’t other writers better than you already written too many novels about the aging process?”  Look forward to all of these.