Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Get Off My Lawn!

Guns N' Roses is conspiring to make me feel old.

Really.

It all started last year, when I went to a club to see a FOAF's band that was coming to town. It was an 18-and-up show, and the girl working the door looked to be about nineteen. I noticed she was wearing a Guns N' Roses T-shirt - a shirt that I used to own. A shirt, in fact, that I bought after seeing them in Dayton, OH my junior year in high school - I remember it was right in the middle of mid-term exams, and due to what I can only assume was one of Axl Rose's trademark hissy fits, the show started about three hours late. I didn't get home until almost 4 o'clock in the morning, and I bombed my biology exam.

The problem was, this girl wasn't wearing the shirt in a "Hey-I-went-to-this-show" way - she was wearing it in a "I'm-so-retro-with-this-vintage-shirt-and-my-Hot-Topic- leopard-print-handbag" way. When I said, "Hey, I used to have that same shirt", she gave me a look that said "That's great, Gramps, try not to fall down and break your hip on our dance floor". Then, while flipping past MTV a few days later, I saw some snot-nosed punk wearing another G'N'R shirt I owned in high school - a shirt that was made when he was still in diapers.

Friday night I went out with a group of friends to celebrate one couple's tenth anniversary. That freaked me out a little, that I knew some people that had actually been married for ten whole years of their lives. Later that weekend I saw this article about Axl Rose and Tommy Hilfiger getting into a fight (I guess it's good to know that some things never change - namely, Axl Rose's ability to be a two-bit thug), and noticed it contained the following line:

"According to the 44-year-old singer..."

My first thought was, "Wait, that can't be right. That would mean the heyday of G'N'R was almost twenty years ago." So, I went to Wikipedia and looked it up. Appetite For Destruction came out in 1987.

Nineteen years ago.

Shit.

I bought that album the summer before I started high school. I vividly remember wearing my Walkman while mowing the lawn, listening to that album at full blast all summer.

Shit.

On top of all this, Axl Rose's appearance isn't helping matters any.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

at least you weren't trying to hit on the girl with t-shirt like i was.

Lucky said...

Wow, you ARE old. ;) I bought Appetite for Destruction in 1991, when I was 14.

Remember listening to Iron Maiden and Dio without a sense of irony?

Surly said...

Axl Rose... another asshole from Indiana, just like me ;)
I heard the other day that A for D still sells like 10,000 units a month or some shit. That's nuts. I never replaced my cassette when my first car ate it but I still know every word on the album.
-------------------------------
Remember listening to Iron Maiden and Dio without a sense of irony?
---------------------------------
This line rules!!!!