MY ADORATION OF JACK BENNY notwithstanding, I decided years ago I wouldn’t rue or deny the inevitable entry into the fourties. I wouldn’t be like those pathetic boomers, forever striving to retain ever-fading remnants of youthful bodies and identities. (My recent diet-exercise regimen had nothing to do with staying young; I was as out-of-shape at 17 as I was last year.)

No, I plan to age disgracefully into a crochety old geezer. Having bosses younger than me, at a paper targeted at readers younger than me, has offered plenty of practice. “Back in my day Sonny, we had real music. Einstruzende Neubauten! Skinny Puppy! Throbbing-fuckin’-Gristle! That crap they listen to these days: Why, it’s just noise!”

I also plan to enjoy the collected experience of my years on Earth. A few years ago I wrote something called “Everything I Ever Really, Really Needed to Know I Learned on the Playground.” Since then I’ve learned a few more things, including the following:

• If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the concentrate.
• Everything retro is neo again.
• Women aren’t just different from men. They’re different from other women.
• Hipsters can be just as prejudiced as anybody. They just have a different set of targets.
• People whose lifestyles are different from yours are not necessarily fascists.
• People who let downtown Manhattan tell them preciesely how to think are no more “empowered” than people who let midtown Manhattan tell them precisely how to think.
• If you only read the New York fucking Times and only listen to NP fucking R, you’ll never know what’s really going on.
• The New York Times really is the Cadillac of American newspapers. It’s bigger, and weighted down with more luxury features, but it’s still built on the same Chevy drive train.
• In an average week, America generates 1,000 books (including 300 new and reprinted fiction volumes), 500 CDs, 150 porn videos, 55 soap-opera episodes, 152 TV talk shows, about 10,000 issues of daily newspapers, 115 prime-time TV shows (in season), a couple hundred magazines, 20 direct-to-video movies, and three theatrical movies. Decentralization of culture isn’t pretty. Live with it.
• Hedonism makes a lousy premise for a revolution, but a great premise for advertising one.
• I used to laugh at people stuck in the ’60s, until I met people stuck in the ’80s.
• Other things happened in the ’60s besides affluent college kids getting stoned and/or laid. In fact, that’s probably the least important thing that happened then.
• You’re not personally guilty of anything that happened before you were born.
• If you’re born into relative privilege, use it to help make a better world. There are enough real victims around, negating any need for victim wannabes.
• Feeling good about yourself isn’t enough. Feeling bad about yourself isn’t enough either.
• Protesting isn’t enough either. You’ve gotta be for something.
• There’s more than one way to think about everything. There’s even more than two ways.
• Natural born hustlers don’t have a clue about what it’s like to not be a natural born hustler.
• There’s nothing inherently truthful about The Word or corruptive about The Image. Images merely deceive; words lie.
• People who suck up to the real centers of money and power are not “rebels,” no matter how loud their custom-painted Harleys are.
• Punk’s older now than hippie was when punk started.
• There is no master race. There is also no master gender, no master sexual orientation, no master bioregion, and no master dietary regimen.
• White women, white gays, and white leftists are still white.
• Grammatical rules are made to be broken, with one exception: Never put an apostrophe in the possessive version of “its.”
• If you like to view images of women’s physiques, it doesn’t necessarily mean you hate women. It probably means you like them.
• We don’t have to tear the fabric of society apart. Big business already did it. We have to figure out how to put it back together.
• Everybody’s ignorant about something.
• A dictatorship of the proletariat would still be a dictatorship.
• Most evil people don’t say they’re evil. They say they’re so utterly, completely good, they can do evil things and it’s OK.
• Love is more important than self-righteousness.
• Even among misfits you’re misfits.