I’m On It
Or, Confessions Of A Curmudgeon
“I’m on it!” The current phrase that says “I can do this,” and “This is my task, stand back.” Yeah yeah. Recently it’s become too easy to hear these current phrases and try to remember what we used to say. “Okay, I’ll get started,” comes to mind. “That sounds easy enough,” and “Here we go,” even “ Will do.”
“Here goes nothing,” was our most used, and probably most famous saying back in the day, mostly because, as kids, we used to say that every time we were about to try something we were unsure of, or attempting something that might be dangerous. I still hear old guys like me say, “Here goes nothing,” once in awhile.
Old school, corny, right? Right. But damn, we sure got a bunch of stuff accomplished upon saying that stuff… that stuff that wasn’t corny when we were young. No sir, Pilgrim. I have wondered, from time to time, why the young ones don’t seem to ever say, “I got this!” It’s always “You got this.” Hmm. Perhaps they’re not really sure if they got this, and need to be told by anyone within earshot. I hear it so often it has begun to sound silly to me. It’s like a person doesn’t really think they can do a thing unless or until someone else assures them they can, that “they can do this.”
I don’t get it. Used to be that, more often than not, the only voice we heard at the beginning of a job or challenge, said things like, “If you can’t do it, I’ll find somebody who can!” And “Hurry it up, I got another job for ya,” or even a simple “Let’s go to work!”
For the 12 years I worked at Doppler Studios in Atlanta, every time Pete, the owner, gave me a new job, my go-to was, “Piece of cake.” I know, I know… very old school, but it worked for me, every single time. Strange, never once did Pete say, “You got this, Hulse.”
I do understand that younger folk don’t want to say the corny stuff we said, There are new and different ways to say things, new and different ways to look at things, new and different ways to do things. And why not? It’s a new and very different world. I know why I bitch and moan about the newness of everything now. I’m analog in a digital world. I’m a stick shift in an automatic world. Lucky enough to have lived this long, unlucky enough to now see how far the new world has moved on without me.
Yes, lucky enough. The fact that it’s becoming a struggle to be a grateful person in a hostile, critical world shouldn’t dampen the fact that we old ones are incredibly lucky to still be around… around to see the differences, the newness of it all, all the while holding onto a sense of peace and contentment, remembering what we had, where we came from, and how it all used to be.
It’s funny. When I came home from college, I was saying everything was “cool.” My dad never used that word. Not once. It wasn’t a part of his vocabulary culture. Finally I know why… I can’t seem to say, “awesome.” Just can’t do it. Nor can I, nor do I say, “You got this.” “No problem” has always bugged me, largely because every time someone says it, there usually is a problem. And as far as “getting hype,” bag it, Jack. I don’t do “hype.”
All those new adjectives, like “fire” and “dope” sound stupid to me, much as “cool” must have sounded stupid to Dad, much like “chill” sounds to me now. I’m sure these generational distinctions and what is hip to say, have been going on for centuries. Probably the distinctions are much more noticeable these days, as life seems to change faster and more radically now than it might have a century ago.
We, of the previous age, understand the new lingo, but we don’t have to like it, and certainly don’t have to use it. There’s a point in life, at least in my estimation, where a person who is 60 or older sounds silly if they say “awesome.” It looks, and sounds as if that person is trying on purpose to be young, to sound young. If it works for them, okay. But I’d bet a small farm that the person isn’t real comfortable saying it, and that if that person is willing to use language to try to convince people that he’s “cool” with the new, more youthful language, he has already lost me in the translation. Can’t help but wonder what else that person might be trying to convince us, and himself, of.
All this on my observation that many of us Americans don’t like old people much and certainly don’t want to be old ourselves… and will do some strange things to fight it. To some degree it’s natural for us to dislike the radically new and different… it’s almost instinctive to want things to remain as they were, especially when we really liked the way they were. As easy as adapting could be when we were younger, it can become a real bitch in old age.
There’s a middle ground, of course, a ground that falls between trying too hard to stay young, and that ground of despising all youth and youthful talk, becoming a grouchy, close-minded old fool in the process. That middle ground seems difficult for many of us, me included, because it asks for acceptance of “how it is” today while remembering “how it was,” and how much more comfortable we were with it.
I have no satisfactory answer for this dilemma thus far; I can see beyond the problem, and I can philosophize on a possible fix, but so far I’ve not been able to drag myself into my own conclusion of a more open-minded understanding of this generation gap. It’s hard. I’d love to be able to say, “I got this!” And really mean it, but I still spend too much time in the past, dancing merrily down the halls of my memories of 81 years of life and adventure… but I know there’s a path to that middle ground, and I’m on it. Sort of.
Steve Hulse
