I’m 31 now. 32 in a bit less than a month. Tomorrow I’m going overseas for the first time in my life (I’ve asked The cbomb if going to Tasmania counts, but she poured a bucket of water on my head and clipped me ’round the earhole, so I guess that’s “No”). I suppose that’s what’s got me thinking about what I wanted my life to be like. The fibs and half-truths and outright lies we tell ourselves about ourselves – the “I’m gonna” and “I wanna” and “I shoulda”.
At the time, and even now, I wanted my teenage years to be a dreamy haze of music, dopesmoke and the kind of safe-but-illicit adventure idolised in teen movies. We were coming of age with Nirvana; The Wu-Tang Clan; raves; Nine Inch Nails; Nick Cave’s tortured, sexual roar paired with the husky piping of Kylie. We were convinced that we were the most important kids ever to debate politics, history, music, art and philosophy in the cafes of Melbourne. That only we understood what it’s like to be alive. The dying years of the 20th Century were ours, man.
They weren’t, though. And we weren’t that important. My teenage years – and I’m thinking about from that strange moment a teenage boy turns 16 onwards – were ordinary, middle-class, and relatively untroubled. I met girls, fell desperately in love, and just as torridly fell out. I went to a few parties, of the roaring random teenage kind, took my pants off, passed out, or played my three records on two old turntables and a mixer dug out of somebody’s shed. I smoked a bit of weed, had an accident with bourbon, entertained a week or two of sexual ambiguity until one of the rugby jocks noticed and shoved my head in a locker.
Just enough to round you out as a person, never enough to seriously trouble my parents. And certainly not enough to trouble the law. In fact, the only time I was ever spoken to in a serious manner by a policeman was for jaywalking across Elizabeth Street to the tram terminus, when I was 27. I might have got a little teary at being told off, but I admit nothing.
What’s my point? I suppose its that its easy to judge yourself, and to expect more. But that maybe what you’ve got is enough to be going on with.