Voices of a Generation

Jason and Meghan are my Token Black Guys.

You know how in buddy movies there’s always one black guy in the otherwise all-white gang, and how the TV networks always haul out the Reverend Jesse Jackson or Dr Cornel West as unofficial spokesperson for the (strangely monolithic) “African American community”?

Well, Meghan and Jason are my representatives of the Younger Generation. Or, more precisely, The Not Always Irritated and Vaguely or Overtly Threatened By Nearly Every Manifestation of 21st-Century Life Generation.

I didn’t specifically choose them for this role, and God knows they didn’t ask for it. In each case it was a product of proximity.

Jason is the older of the two. He’s in his early 30s and is the “Web guy” at my workplace. In fact, he set up this blog for me. Which isn’t surprising, because he’s generous to a fault. This keeps me from hating his guts for being smarter, better looking, more successful and two decades farther from death than I.

Meghan is in her mid 20s and has the office next to mine. She’s smart, pretty, has unlimited potential and is roughly half my age. But she typically laughs at my jokes, so all is forgiven.

When Jason first came to my workplace from his previous job as a hotshot writer for the Green Bay Packers’ Web site—a gig way cooler than ANY I’ve had in my 30 years in writing/editing, not that I’m bitter or anything—he was assigned the office where Meghan now resides. So, it’s not exactly a mystery how I became acquainted with these two. While it’s true I don’t get out much—at any given time I probably couldn’t identify by sight, let alone name, more than half of our 170-plus employees—I do at least get next door.

Jason is a huge sports fan and film lover, so we kind of bonded from the start over baseball and movies. Still, when he suggested a couple of years ago that we set a standing lunch date to ensure a weekly hour of face time in the midst of any given crazy work week, I felt rather like Sally Field at the Academy Awards, marveling that the young stud “really likes me!” And if that sounds a bit homoerotic to you, well, I offer as counterevidence the number of crude “That’s what she said” jokes we make all the time. Which you might say is only further evidence of a subtext of sexual tension. To which I respond, “Uh uh!” and “I’m a married heterosexual male,” and “Not that there’s anything wrong with being gay” and “Why am I needlessly belaboring this point in my own blog?!”

Anyway.

It took a little longer for friendship with Meghan to develop. We didn’t have obvious things in common, and I didn’t want to do or say anything to put her on skeezy-older-guy alert, locking her door in dread that I’d stop by to confide my wife doesn’t understand me, or to offer fashion suggestions involving greater display of skin. But it developed over time that for all our differences—encapsulated in a conversation during which, to paraphrase, I mourned for the days before 24-hour connectivity and she wondered why anyone would eschew its marvels—we share a number of crankinesses. Like wishing people would shut up in movie theaters, and loathing bad writing and stupid grammatical mistakes, and being driven batty by some of the same co-workers. We also found that our senses of humor and tastes in music are in many ways attuned.

When it got to the point that we were sharing dark cartoons and riotously offensive Onion stories with each other, I sensed we had crossed some generational Rubicon. Also, as I got to know Meghan better, I was endeared and put at ease by her tightness with her parents—who, after all, are my contemporaries. She clearly counts her mom and dad as friends, which is a strange concept to me. I mean, I love my parents, but I don’t hang out with them. I schedule short visits, hope nobody blows a gasket, then beat it out of there. Still, I like the fact that Meghan thinks coolness can extend beyond age 50.

Like most crabby old farts, I used to reflexively assume that “kids today” were completely self-absorbed, rude, disrespectful, ignorant of history, slavishly devoted to every new gadget, incapable of breaking away from groupthink long enough to decide a tattoo really isn’t necessary, and governed by the fashion rule that if it doesn’t annoy yours truly, it shouldn’t be worn. And I’m not saying that my experience with Jason and Meghan has disavowed me of all those notions. As that old-school nautical philosopher Popeye used to say, I yam what I yam. Which is to say, I really am crabby and old. (And sometimes farty, as Lynn would attest, but that’s a different story.)

I mean, my overriding feeling about the 21st century and my place in it was succinctly and brilliantly described in the New Yorker cartoon from a few years ago that shows a weary looking older guy saying into a phone, “Just waiting for Facebook to go away.” That cartoon bespeaks a mindset—my mindset—that doesn’t take kindly to the world it knew so rapidly disappearing.

But you know, I think my two Token Young Guys (Guy and Gal, whatever) serve me well, and that the gods of office seating showered me with providence. Because, for every debate I have with Meghan about whether cell phones are indispensable or an abomination, for every time I wish Jason would renounce his iPod and buy economically indefensible CDs like me, I enjoy many more moments with them that are built on commonalities or spent laughing at our gulfs.

Perhaps within their circles of friends, I’m a token, too. The Naysayer. The Holdout. The “Ungooglable Man,” per another New Yorker cartoon, by Roz Chast, that marvels “Even the most powerful search engines cannot detect him! No Facebook page, no MySpace page, no nothing! And yet he walks amongst us!” In many ways I am that man. But I’m also living proof that even the Ungooglable Man can start a blog. It might have been set up by Jason, and it may be known to only a handful of people, but this blog is one new millennium wave I’m actually riding.

I’m still waiting in vain for Facebook and its inevitable successors to go away. But I can’t say there aren’t things I love about this day and age. Like doing what I’m doing right now at my keyboard. And acquiring friends who add richness and variety to my old and farty life.