When to Get Hip Replacement: Problems Facing the New Older Man

I am at logger heads with my culture. I have reached a point where the only place to get away from it is in bed. I am afraid to go out. I am not hip.

O.K., that is over selling the point a little, but how else am I going to get your attention in a place where even your toothpaste is ‘extreme’ and if your fast food meal has not been reified and mediated by a superhero or sports event, it doesn’t cut the mustard.

I am a white, male. I am well over six foot tall. I am pretty well educated and live in one of the richest (per capita) countries in the world. Whilst I’m no George Clooney, they don’t run from the room screaming either. I have no disadvantages. Why this moment of angst in someone so manifestly engineered to be one of the monsters of this environment?

A certain sort of rag, of which there are two in regular competition in Australia, creeps into my abode every now and then. Your girl reads them because they love nothing more than the fab star, caught with their breasts out, the last face job on the turn and an inappropriately aged toy-boy on the arm. You read them because they’re in the house and you stand a chance of seeing a fab star with her breasts out. As delicious as all this schadenfreude is (almost as much fun as the failure of a close friend) I was delivered a nasty shock when leafing through one of these mags the other day and I instantly recognized less than half the photos.

So what? Well let me put this in perspective. I pride myself on being a half decent generalist. Renaissance man is too strong a word for it now because the ideal of the Renaissance man is not achievable any more. There is simply too much to know. But I feel it is possible to be conversant with major themes. I am not lost at the opera or the Big Day Out. Teleology or Tic Tac Toe is fine by me. I’m happy to probe the big questions like, ‘Are animals self aware?’ or ‘Is Paris Hilton self aware?’ and part of this ability to play a half decent game of trivia down at the pub, is my awareness of famous people.

As I’m sure you all know, people used to get famous for being very good at something. Now that that is not a requirement, it is hard to keep track of people who suddenly rise to prominence for seemingly no more reason than some random choice of ‘leaked’ home footage on the internet. It is astonishingly hard to keep abreast of the fabulous famous nobodies, without the aid of defining careers or events to pin their fame too. It turns out I’m an old fashioned kind of guy. I keep asking what they do. There seems to be an amorphous sort of haze of timeless, meaningless party type glamour out there that it is possible to tap into and live off if you are one of those types.
I am officially unhip. To quote Zaphod, I’m so unhip it’s a wonder my bum doesn’t fall off. I’m so unhip I quote Zaphod. I have turned a page on a magazine and turned a corner in my life, I don’t know who they are and I don’t care.