I wish that I knew what I was supposed to know now when I was my current age

"Poor old Granddad, I laughed at all his words."

I keep hearing the Faces' song "Ooh La La" in movies, TV shows, and commercials. Why? What is it about this particular track that's allowed it to stick around for decades? As I see it, the song's main appeal is that it takes a near-universal sentiment—"I wish that I knew what I know now when I was younger"—and sets it to catchy music. This is a thought many of us have had at some point in our lives, and "Ooh La La" allows us to sing it out loud instead of just ponder it. And so, "Ooh La La" has become a song about the hard-won wisdom that only comes with age.

But I don't think the song, written in 1973 by Ronnie Wood and Ronnie Lane (both 26 years old at the time), is as heartwarming as people seem to think it is. The lyrics of the first verse add some necessary context to the song's famous refrain.

Poor old Granddad, I laughed at all his words
I thought he was a bitter man
He spoke of women's ways
"They trap you, then they use you
Before you even know
For love is blind and you're far too kind
Don't ever let it show"

Try making a heartwarming insurance commercial out of that. Sounds like Granddad is working through some serious issues with women. And his smartaleck grandson does not take him seriously whatsoever. So much for hard-won wisdom.

Still in all, we have that indelible chorus: "I wish that I knew what I know now when I was younger." It's a comforting thought. Everything would have turned out better, we tell ourselves, if we'd just been given the necessary information at a young age. Forewarned is forearmed.

As I think about the current, unsatisfactory state of my life, I've occasionally asked myself the question: what do I wish I had known as a child that would have helped me avoid this fate? And, frankly, I've come up short. The problem with the line "I wish that I knew what I know now" is that it assumes you actually know something now! I don't. Nothing good at least. I've only learned how rotten the world can be. I know which choices of mine didn't work, but I don't know of any better ones I could have made or should have made.

And so, despite what the song says, I can't think of any advice I'd give to my younger self that would have helped him or any wisdom that would have prepared him for adulthood. In fact, if it hadn't been for ignorance—the total, blissful stupidity we only tolerate in children—I'd never have gotten any fun out of life at all. The more I learned of this world, the less I liked. So my version of "Ooh La La" would probably go something like: "I wish I knew as little now as I did when I was younger."

Spirits from the vasty deep

A Pink Flamingos family portrait, modeled after a Diane Arbus photo (right).

What's in my filing cabinet.

Probably the oldest thing I have in my apartment, other than what's in the refrigerator (that's a joke; my fridge is empty), is a large gray filing cabinet that I keep in my bedroom/home office. It's an ugly, ungainly monstrosity that dates back to, I'm guessing, the 1950s. There's nothing elegant about it. In fact, it has sharp metal corners that have injured me several times. Why do I keep it around? I don't know. Sentimentality, I guess, though I can't say for sure where the cabinet came from or how it came into my possession. I used to have two of them, but I threw one out. So what's in the one remaining filing cabinet? Junk, mostly. Old CDs and VHS tapes take up the top three drawers. The fourth is filled with manila folders, containing assorted papers from the late 1980s and 1990s.

I was more of a pack rat back in the '90s. I was also more fanatical about my pop culture obsessions: Rocky Horror, They Might Be Giants, Spinal Tap, John Waters, Phantom of the Paradise, A Clockwork Orange, "Weird Al" Yankovic, etc. I still like all that stuff, but I'm not a rabid collector the way I used to be. I have a few thick folders of newsletters, postcards, and clippings related to They Might Be Giants, dating back to about 1988 or so. Nowadays, I barely keep up with TMBG. I think I've skipped their last two or three albums, something that would have been unthinkable to my teenage self. I haven't seen them in concert in god knows how long. Sixteen years at least. Yikes.

What happened? I dunno. People get older. Ardor cools. Adulthood calls. There are bills and dental appointments and shit like that. The Internet killed a lot of my fandom, really. When I started out as a TMBG fan, it was hard finding their stuff. I had to go to out-of-the-way record stores to locate EPs and singles. Press coverage was minimal, so I obsessively clipped every magazine and newspaper article I could find. That was oddly rewarding to me. Now, with just a one-second Google search, I could find more information about TMBG than I could ever hope to get through in a dozen lifetimes. Yawn.

But every once in a while, I get the urge to go through that filing cabinet and rifle through my grunge era memories. Today I went through my personal John Waters archives. Mostly, it was articles I'd photocopied at the college library. There was a mid-1990s Polyester Odorama card, too, and it very much retained its original smell. To a fault, you might say. The oddest, most personal find was a bit of fan art I'd apparently started and then abandoned about 20 years ago. It depicted the cast of Pink Flamingos posed as if they were in a Diane Arbus photo. Drawn in pencil on fragile typing paper, it was badly faded and barely visible. You can see it at the top of this post. Other than making it darker so that it shows up on your screen, I've left it as it was back then. It reminds me of the person I used to be, the one who would do crude fan art while watching VHS tapes of his favorite John Waters movies.

Time

The wrinkled, leathery face of pure bliss

You're goddamned right I'm in the Hall of Fame! Suck on it, Bieber!

When late singer Bill Haley's backing group, The Comets, was recently inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, drummer  simply could not contain his enthusiasm at the ceremony, holding his award statuette aloft like the Hammer of Thor and wearing an expression both joyous and terrifying Dick Boccelli (a.k.a. Dick Richards) at the same time.

I happened to see a photo of the aged rock legend in Rolling Stone and was utterly charmed by the way this man totally gave himself to the excitement and energy of the moment. In a way, it's a very comforting image. Wouldn't it be nice to have this kind of enthusiasm at Mr. Boccelli's advanced age? The future can be a vague and threatening entity, but pictures like this give us all hope. Maybe amid the slow decay of our bodies and the gradual erosion of our faculties, we might still take pleasure in the little moments of success afforded to us by life.

I was so moved by this drummer's example, in fact, that I decided to create a photographic tribute to him entitled TRIUMPHANT OLD MAN. I do hope you will enjoy.

And to show you that Mr. Boccelli can still do it, here's a very recent clip of the man himself in action:



Age ain't nothing but a number, baby.