You drive thirty minutes to find the usual haunt closed for a private event.
Tonight must be salvaged like a classic car.
You text most of the few friends you're still in touch with, none respond in time to do anything.
To the old bars you go for wine from a box in search of an adolescence that happened in your early thirties. You see an acquaintance so distant you don't say hi.
Social media shows old bandmates have a show in your old neighborhood, you drive over and contrive to run into them by coincidence.
They take you to a bar: why do all these little children have tattoos?
There's a punk band playing. The kids should be beating the shit out of each other, instead they're all checking their phones. Maybe the phones have a moshing app.
Then you realize, this music from the Carter Era is the music of their parents. For them, The Ramones are classical music, and they listen like they're going to church.
Time's thievery of youth is not very subtle, Milton was wrong about that.
Age dwindles the friend list, time dwindles the sacrifices we make to keep them, tensions dwindle their willingness to keep us, paranoia dwindles the willingness to try with them again, morale dwindles the willingness to make new ones.
We all come to prize our dignity like bees their queen, as though pride is something a computer can quantify.
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