You tend to think of aging as a linear process, but it also has a fractal quality; that is to say, any given increase in age can be held up against the sweep of all the years you’ve lived and look the same, like holding up a rock to cast it in relief with the peak of the mountain where you found it. We spend all of our time aging, and we spend a lot of our time thinking about how we’re aging all the time. This tendency is one of the few things that gets easier with age. I’m hardly alone in saying that I both did not want my 20s to be over and also found turning 30 easier than reaching my late 20s, emotionally; I’m hardly alone in being in some sense deeply unhappy that I’m in my 40s but so much less worried about my age than I was more than a decade ago. Aging is weird. And like I said, fractal - the feeling of being old at any given age has the same outline as the feeling of being a creature that ages.
When I was in my early 20s, I went to the Webster Theater in Hartford to see a piano-based emo band with my friend Katilyn. I can’t remember the name; my Googling keeps turning up Jack’s Mannequin but I think the dates don’t line up right. Whatever the name, I had never heard of them, but she was a fan. These were the days when I went to see shows all the time, often at the Webster, sometimes at the dear departed hardcore and metal club the El’n’Gee in New London, sometimes at Wesleyan, and pretty much anywhere else. Today it’s hard to imagine going to a general-admission show for a band that I didn’t know, but I did that sort of thing all the time back then. And I have a lot of great memories at the Webster. I went to see the Moldy Peaches open for the Strokes and met a cute girl with a labret piercing; my friend Matt and I made a human wall to shield a couple of small women from the mosh pit when we went to see Kittie. (Morgan Lander shouted me out for wearing a God Forbid t-shirt.) And, anyway, I was listening to a lot of emo and proto-emo and similar in those days - the Get-up Kids in particular, Sunny Day Real Estate, Brand New. I’m not the kind to regret the music I used to listen to when I was younger, much less mock it, as so many people do, but I will confess that it can be hard to listen to that music now, maybe because I wore out the sound. For the record I still listen to Four Minute Mile sometimes but can’t bear to put on Something to Write Home About.
Anyway - she had an extra ticket and I was never going to turn down a show in those days. It was a tough time for me. I had begun my “mental illness journey” but was in deep denial, I was directionless, I had no money, and I was lonely. I was also a bit of a bigger guy, and that turned out to be crucial that night.
My beloved, late dog Miles weighed about 70 pounds. I found that this often put me in a bit of a bind when choosing what size item or pill to buy for him - if memory serves, a lot of things made for dogs had weight guidelines where Medium ended and Large started at 70 pounds, or 75 or whatever. So Miles was a tweener, a big Medium or a small Large. And I’m the same. I’m about 6’1, maybe 6’2 in shoes and for most of my adult life I hovered within 20 pounds of 200. (Subject to mania and meds.) So I’m not anyone’s idea of a huge man, but I am larger than average by any standard and occasionally referred to as “big guy” by strangers. I have been big enough that women looking for a man of a certain size would not automatically swipe left on my Tinder profile. I’m big enough.
At this concert, though. This concert appeared to be made up mostly of high school students. I was perhaps 22 or 23, but somehow probably in the top quartile for age at that show. Almost everyone appeared to be a high school student. And not just high school students, but particularly sensitive emo kids, where the guys all appeared to be about 5’7 or smaller and wore eyeshadow. In a normal crowd I’m a bigger guy. In this crowd I was The Big Guy. All of which, of course, contributed to my sense that in my early 20s I was already too old, in some sense - not too old for most things, but too old to be young. It sounds absurd to me now; it was absurd then. But I was behind in college compared to most of my peers, destined to graduate at something like 24 instead of 22; again, a meaningless distinction for me now, but something that meant a great deal at the time. Perhaps the biggest thing is that I was not a writer yet, at that time, would never have been comfortable calling myself one, had denied that I would ever want to be a writer. And so I did not have one thing that I felt I was really good at, one thing that ordered my life. So I was standing around bopping to the music, enjoying the show, and also I was depressed and self-hating and feeling too old.
Deliverance came from an unexpected place. Everyone was grooving; everyone looked sensitive and quiet. Nobody moshed. But someone wanted to go up - to crowd surf, that is. Because what I saw a few rows of people ahead of me was a small thin kid with long black hair, Desi. He was peering around the crowd. When he saw me his eyes lit up, and he pointed a single finger in the air at me, a quizzical look on his face. I couldn’t make out what he meant. Then he pointed at me and mimed climbing on someone’s shoulder, and I got it. I motioned him over. He snaked through the crowd, grinning, and approached me. I half picked him up, he half climbed on top of me, and I said “up you go.” And he surfed around on the crowd, carried by the grace of strangers. I watched him moved around the crowd. I felt good. I felt useful. Then, to my total and unguarded delight, other people started to ask. One after another, shy sheepish teenagers, boys and girls, would turn to face me, or crawl through the crowd to get to me, and stick their fingers in the air with innocent and hopeful grins, and I’d nod sagely like I was some sort of old sailor being asked to navigate choppy waters, and I’d lift their gentle bodies into the air so that they could float on a cloud of hands and feel the glory. I don’t know how many over the course of the concert. Maybe a dozen. Some people came back for seconds.
I can’t remember a single song, just the general impression of plaintive yearning emo singing and incongruous but melodic piano. But I will always remember the feeling of helping those wide-eyed kids, too young to know the jaggedness of the earth but compelled to bellow along to music about the pains of being alive. Up you go. Up you go. Up you go. One skinny little thing after another, hefted above by my shoulders, which we only thick in comparison to the crowd. I had been a three-sport athlete in high school, and a bad one, perhaps running towards decent in cross country, which required no coordination. I had been lifting weights for several years but was a hard gainer; if it hadn’t happened already, my metabolism was soon to slow and give me love handles and force me to change my habits. My body had done little for me at this point but store the depression and mania which habitually assaulted the essential hydraulics of my mind. But that night…. That night I was the big guy, and I spent my time in service of others, and in return I received the look of wide-eyed request as they would raise their fingers towards the sky. I had never before felt useful, had always felt quite useless. That night I bore them like a pallbearer into an afterlife of light and music, and what I felt was joy, joy, joy.