Well, it's finally happened: I heard Nirvana's "Heart-shaped Box" on the oldies station, sandwiched between Pink Floyd and-- God, help us all-- the Eagles, who, to borrow a particularly apt expression of distaste I heard recently, crawled directly from Satan's anus.
The event is significant because hearing a rebellion song from my youth on an oldies station, whose stated mission is to "jam through your workday," makes me, by extension, old. I've been slowly coming to terms with this, both by having steadily more white hairs to pluck from my head, and by recognizing a growing malevolence towards the tastes and habits of people younger than me. 'How the hell is Christina Aguilera allowed to live?' for example, is a question that has occurred to me several times, and points to oldness.
I was fourteen when "In Utero," Nirvana's last official album, came out. My family was living in Saudi Arabia and the cover image on the copy of the album I bought had been carefully colored in by an official censor from the Ministry of the Prevention of Vice and the Promotion of Virtue. Seriously. It was, and is, a recognized government organization with an army of censors who sift through mountains of pornographic Western cereal boxes and Seventeen magazines with varying widths of black permanent markers drawing modest black leggings and body suits on images of women. The unique pathology of a censor is poetically evident when you stand in a grocery store looking at rows and rows of Michelle Kwan Wheaties boxes meticulously colored in.
But I digress.
My chastely altered copy of "In Utero" was dear to my heart. I appreciated it for its cryptic, evocative lyrics and gutteral, howling guitar solos. The fractured quality of Kurt Cobain's voice spoke in universal terms to all things confused, cornered and hurting, which I think is a pretty accurate description of what it felt like to be fourteen.
When Kurt Cobain committed suicide, I was fifteen and he was 27. 27 seemed to be a mythical age because it's the age of some of the Great Rock Deaths-- Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison come to mind-- and seemed to me at the time to be some sort of a jumping off point. If things don't work out by the time you're 27, they're not going to. Also, to a fifteen-year-old, the prospect of living almost your entire life over again before you even reach 27 seems like an exhausting, herculean feat.
So imagine my surprise when, driving home from work today, I heard Nirvana on the oldies station and realized that I am 27. This was both horrifying and extremely comforting. Horrifying because I think the fourteen-year-old me would have puked if she thought she would turn out so boring-- listening to NPR, addicted to nothing racier than lattes, and married. But it's also incredibly comforting that I've found someone who's agreed to put up with tangled old me for the long haul, that I can finally give a shit about things happening outside of my own head, and that excitement is no longer defined by killing landslides of brain cells.
I just don't know how I'll handle the muzak version of "Polly."
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