Here I am, 26 years old and sitting in some upstairs bar on College listening to a band whose name I didn’t catch and probably wouldn’t remember anyway. I’m surrounded by fake ID’d highschool kids drinking draft beer out of mugs too big for their hands, complimenting each other on their funny and ironic t-shirts. There are girls in aquamarine go-go dresses and homemade frocks bopping to the music, their hoop earrings clinking, keeping time for the adolescent vocalist and his oversized guitar. He pauses in his warbling every few beats to give a shake to his head, getting the unruly mop of hair out of his eyes and it’s like watching a weekend rockstar being born. It’s a Sunday but not a school night.

There are slightly-wrinkled, slightly-bearded twenty and thirty-somethings lined up on stools at the bar in the back, knocking back shots of Red Label and watching the original Transformers flick – the animated one – on an anachronistically fitting Betamax VCR. Before that it was Labyrinth, Bowie’s Goblin King codpiece taking up almost the entire 13″ television set. The entire room – from the makeshift stage at the front to the washrooms and coat racks at the back – is a mish-mash of ages, of generations even, and I don’t know quite what to make of it yet.

Maybe I’ve just been out of “the scene” for too long. That is, if I was ever in it to begin with.

I remember when I was as old as some of the kids in here. I remember hitting up the El Mo when my buddy’s band was playing. It was like a carnival – everyone you knew, everyone you saw everyday in school was out, downtown, most likely drunk, all having fun, dancing, singing, getting fucked up together. Once the show was done we’d all make our way across the intersection to Coffee Time (which isn’t there anymore) to get hot drinks to soothe our now-voiceless throats and regroup before heading back to the neighbourhood. Youthful, joyful abandon. Plain and simple. Now, though, I wonder, am I too young to feel nostalgic?

The next act is a synth-drum-machine-hip-hop-ish duo with face paint all over themselves; precise, somehow melodic electronic beats accompanying songs like “Hard As Fuck” and “Bitches Be Hos”. I take a closer look at the one rhyming, while he removes layer after layer of hoody (he must be wearing at least six of them) and, yes, he’s one of the fellows I noticed earlier at the bar, one of the ones I thought were here for the booze rather than the bands. As I sit listening, sipping my pint of Stock, I have a sneaking suspicion that the grey-haired couple sitting at the other end of my table, rapt in attention, eyes agleam with pride, are his parents, come to support Junior’s band.

How sweet, I think, before I have a chance to think anything else of it.

It’s not that I begrudge any of these kids their good time. Far from it. But it’s a weird feeling for me to feel so… old? Out of place? I easily push cynicism aside, though, as I tap my foot and sip my beer and smile at the pretty young things enjoying themselves to music that I’ve never heard before and will probably never hear again. Especially the girl in the go-go dress – she seems to know every lyric. 

I, however, can barely make them out. Getting old? Probably. But there’s enough youth in the room that for the time being I’m 17 again, listening to my buddy’s band up on stage, getting drunk on cheap beer.

Only this time, I have ID.