I always wonder when I'll wake up and think, "Man, I'm old." It hasn't happened yet. I wonder when it will dawn on me. Maybe when I hear a Nirvana song on an oldies station.

Sometimes I miss being 21, like most guys, but most of the time I'm glad that I've managed to attain some stability in my life. But I don't feel like I'm past the prime of my life and I'm not sure when that's going to happen.

My dad always says, "You're only as old as you feel." I interpret that to mean something like, "If you use the power of denial, really hard, you can convince yourself that you're not old."

As I've said before, I'm not very sentimental. I have the occasional bout of nostalgia, but I don't dwell on it too much, because life is still happening for me. You never know: the days I'm living through right now could be the "good ol' days" that I talk about several years from now.

Eventually, I'll find myself clinging to something that people much younger than me think is antiquated. Most of the things that have been produced in my lifetime, however, haven't been all that great. Music's been okay, major retail chains put small mom and pop operations out of business before I was old enough to care, and contemporary art is just plain garbage. As a whole, there's not that much substance from a cultural perspective for my generation to cling to. So we've all got that going for us.

Maybe I'm too cynical. Or too old.