On Nostaliga

This weekend I found myself in a bar bidding farewell to one of my fiance's co-workers who is bound for Brazil to teach English as a second language. As we approached the front door I heard the unmistakable sound of disco blaring out through the throng of fiftyish barflies who, in this modern era, had been relegated to smoking outside. I resigned myself to enduring Andy Gibb for a few hours, overpaying for scotch, and being grateful that I was overtly attached to my date, as signified by the engagement ring and her habit of clutching my hand in fear when confronted by aging drunkards. In the end it wasn't that bad at all; the booze was certainly overpriced, but the bartender wasn't particularly mindful of his portion control so it all evened out in the end, and our hostess and her friends were charming and gracious the whole night through. Being a decade older than my fiance, I was a bit closer to the rest of the crowd in age anyway, and having been introduced to music at a young age I even had my own moments of nostalgia now and again as I remembered where I was when I first heard a particular Donna Summers song. Everyone else at the table was out smoking pot in a white polyester suit and I was at home experimenting with something called 'Lincoln Logs' on an avocado-green berber carpet, but at least I remembered it.

As the evening progressed, I realized that even in a bar dedicated to the revival of thirty-year-old dance music the management had devoted yet another entirely seperate room to what the normative patrons regarded as the 'older crowd' (i.e., the ones on oxygen). Dubbed the Elvis Room, it dialed the scene back a further ten to twenty years. In conversing with some of our fellow revelers I learned that it had, until fairly recently, been called the Sinatra Room. I was just about to ask why the shift in theme had occured, when it suddently hit me: mortality. The people who came for Sinatra were, as time progressed, thinning out due to age and eventually death. Every ten years that room was going to be renamed after someone whose heyday was a decade prior to the main room's standard fare as old patrons died and new patrons turned forty.

It was a grim revelation that I thought best to keep private while in the company of people who were themselves inexorably sliding back toward whatever the Elvis Room would be renamed in the years to come, but that moment of potential poigniance was completely shattered by the absurdity of continuing that logic into the next thirty years. Am I going to be in that same fucking bar someday listening to Bauhaus in the Huey Lewis Lounge, while the younger crowd is requesting old Marilyn Manson numbers in the main room?

And in that scenario, how much more obscenely expensive will a twelve-year-old scotch become?