Add It Up

I like going to birthday parties where the guest of honor thinks they’re turning old, but really, at a couple decades behind me, has no clue as to what old actually is, because it reminds me that neither do I, frankly, despite the fact that I’m pretty sure—as I was when some girl was on the karaoke stage belting out the Bryan Adams song, “Summer of 69”—that I was the one person in the room who had been born by then, even though I wasn’t as interested as the song’s narrator at that time in cars, girls, and music, as I was by bikes, bb guns, and model rocketry.

Age is just a number, and even though in my case, it’s one that’s divisible by the average age of the guests in attendance last night, it’s reassuring to think (or perhaps pathetic to observe) that a guy of my advanced years can still get up on a makeshift stage and with a younger partner scream out the lyrics to a song that came into the world just about the same year as plenty of the people there listening to it—and still have a fucking blast doing so.

I remember thrashing around on the dance floor to the Violent Femmes, “Add It Up” at Club West in Seattle, Monday nights in 1984; it was 80’s Night, I guess, but since it actually was the 80s, we just called in “night.”

It’s kind of amazing to me how well the song has held up, but then again, I guess Gordon Gano’s question, “Why can’t I get just one fuck?” is as timeless as ever; I’m sure just as many people are wondering that today as back then, in any case.

A quarter-century goes by in a flash, unless of course, you’re waiting at the DMV; 25 years from now I don’t know if I’ll still be singing karaoke, but I’m pretty sure I will be old.