You’re older than you’ve ever been,
and now you’re even older,
and now you’re older still.

TIME! is marching on
and time… is still marching on.

-They Might Be Giants, “Older”

Like a lot of the guys in my high school class, I am a fan of the two-man band They Might Be Giants. Unlike the guys in my high school class, I didn’t really care for the group when I was actually in high school, not catching on to them until I got into college and they started playing instruments along with a band instead of playing accordions along with a tape loop. (I would hear their early albums and think, “This demo will make a good song one day.” Eventually, they bought guitars and embraced convention enough to satisfy my mediocre sense of music appreciation, and all was forgiven.) I began to grow into them as everyone else was most likely growing out of them.

Last year, TMBG went on their seemingly unending tour, one show of which I was lucky enough to see. At that show, the band spoke at great length about how excited they were to be playing at that week’s venues, being enthusiastic fans of St. Louis’ Mississippi Nights and especially Columbia’s Blue Note. (I’m glad they were glad, but I’ve always felt Mississippi Nights should be renamed something like “Better Than Playing the Amtrak Station, However Slightly” or “I Guess the Pageant Was Booked.”) Their joy was apparent; as they toured, the band wrote and recorded songs about every venue they played, and the Blue Note song is so buoyant and happy they sound as though their instruments might carry them off into the clouds at any moment.

As I tried vainly to dislodge the Blue Note song from my head again this weekend, it occurred to me that Columbia is a college town, full every fall of the recent high schoolers who always seemed to gravitate towards They Might Be Giants. But for how much longer?, I wondered. Those guys have been together for something like twenty-five years; no matter how exuberant and off-kilter they
are, how much longer will they be of interest to nineteen year olds? They will always love the Blue Note, but for how much longer will the Blue Note love them?

I will turn thirty in the next twenty-four hours, so very little light has reached my eyes lately without going through that prism. How long will it be before I look like a ridiculous old man in this shirt, instead of a ridiculous young man? When does goofy become creepy old man? Every so often, hip hop videos will dress octogenarians like b-boys for the comic relief; I’d rather like it if that wasn’t me.

I wouldn’t say the prospect of turning thirty makes me feel old; I would say that, in some ways, I have felt old for a very long time, and now it feels like everything is finally catching up. When I was in third grade, the teacher made a fateful note on my report card that “Jim is eight going on forty-nine”; I would hear this sentiment in one form or another expressed often as I grew up, and whether it was true or not it wormed its way into the mirror long ago. I don’t think it did me any favors. It’s dangerous to believe your own press where stuff like that is concerned.

For example: I know more than a few people who will tell you that human beings are rational, or at least that they consider themselves to be reasonable. They are proud to run their lives like a debate team or logic problem. If there’s someone at your dinner party shrieking at you with spit bubbles forming in the corners of the mouth because you voted for the wrong person, it is probably one of these rational people. Rational people are the most irrational people I know; the rest of us drive them f—ing nuts.

In that same way, I think the idea that I was mature allowed me to give myself permission to do be a 24-karat crybaby for years at a time. Especially in college: I was grown and done and perfect the way I was, dammit, and when my friends began to evolve and change–indeed, began to seek out change–I pouted and threw tantrums and did everything I could think of to keep my life exactly the way it was whether anybody in it wanted it that way or not.

The folly of that thinking has been proven to me in several recent years during which a lot of things never changed and, like the dripping faucet in the dead of night or the upstairs neighbor’s love of Ace of Base, it started to slowly turn me into the narrator of “The Telltale Heart.” There were times when I would come home to the same comfortable apartment after a night of seeing people I’d enjoyed hanging out with for years and think, “I don’t know how much more of this I can stand.” Get locked in a small room with your best friend for long enough, and one of you isn’t getting out of there alive.

Years ago, there was an alligator in the reptile house at the zoo that looked to be roughly 147 years old. I had been going to the zoo for my entire life, and by the time I was a college student I had still never seen that alligator move. We used to dare one another to climb into the cage and turn it over to look for the stitches. In the gator’s cage, there was a sign that said, as I recall, “Please do not throw change at Scaly the Alligator; it pisses him off, but not enough for him to snap at you.” This sign was invariably surrounded by about
$17 in loose change. Enough people ignored the sign that eventually some little snot put Scaly’s eye out with a nickel, prompting Scaly to say, “god dammit,” and go back to sleep. After many, many years of this, Scaly (verifiably) died. They performed an autopsy/made the zookeeper a jacket and, to everyone’s vexation but no one’s surprise, about ten bucks in pennies fell out of Scaly.

The point of this story, other than “little kids can be total a-holes,” is that I was feeling pretty Scaly a year or two ago. The gator cage was starting to get a little too small, and I felt like I had been locked in with a few of the same faces for a little too long. I would think, “One more penny and I start snapping,” but every time I opened my mouth someone would just whip some more change in there. So after a while, I just sort of sat in the sun, dimes bouncing off my hide, one day passing into the next.

I had to meet my fiancee to fully realize any of this was happening. When she strolled into the picture, I was sitting in my life like a locked garage with the car engine running. Things were slowly getting more toxic, but all I really knew was that I was tired. It wasn’t until I saw how my life could change that I said, “I am going to waddle right over to those bars and bite that little brat’s hand off.” It’s just another part of the human condition, or at least this human’s condition: you can see exactly what you’re doing wrong with the clarity of polished glass, but only several years later.

So I welcome thirty. I welcome marriage and moving and home ownership and babies and the warm, fuzzy blanket of senility. I never for a moment believed I would make it this far, and I feel like I’ve won some kind of prize. To my thirties, I say, “Bring it on,” if only so I can see exactly what I was doing wrong at 29.