My birthday is once again on the horizon. This one will be a milestone of sorts. First, I will have outlived my father by a year as the Grim Reaper didn’t bother to stop by to say an eternal hello. Second, it will be my birth year. If you know what year I was born, saw off the first two numbers and you’ll know how old I am. This only happens once in your life, so it’s kind of cool.

It is also a bit vexing. As you grow older, you run the risk of becoming a bit of an old fogey. That means you’re old-fashioned, a stick-in-the-mud, not willing to change.

I don’t want to be an old fogey. My father most certainly was. Somewhere along the songline that was his life, he got off the bus and stayed in a comfy little place in the past. A place where World War II was the best memories to be had and country and western music played on the radio. It was a simpler time, one without all those long haired hippies, rock ‘n’ roll and crazy liberal ideas.

My mother, for her part, stayed on the bus. She kept riding it for more than 20 years, before she too found a comfortable place to stay, one that didn’t have the likes of Beyonce, LBGTWXYZ equality and hipsters.

Me? I continue to move on down the road, though I admit that I have lost a step or two. As I wrote a few weeks ago, I don’t pay attention as much to pop culture as I used to. Part of this is due to time constraints and part of this is due to the fact that I simply don’t care much who is sleeping with whom in Hollywood or who got the most views on YouTube last week.

That’s not to say I am becoming a fogey. I still stay up on things, I’m just not the voracious consumer I used to be. I still listen to top 10 sometimes, just to see what that latest styles are in music. I know what’s hot in the fashion world and I still watch some TV shows that months later become “the” show to watch.

Yet, I still don’t get hipsters. Sorry gents, those beards would have made me crazy. Yes, I had a beard back in the day. What guy didn’t? But we didn’t yearn to self-identify with a particular strata of society and think we were cooler than anyone else. We just grew a beard because we wanted to see if we could.

Most of us quickly found that they are a total pain to deal with. It’s just easier to shave in the morning instead of spending hours snipping, trimming and primping. Plus, we don’t have to endure the embarrassment of finding Ritz Cracker crumbs from that night we passed out in bed – when we’re out on a date!

But back to being a fogey. I think it’s a natural inclination. I see it in some of the people I know. Those older than me often find computers frustrating. Some of them – wait for it – still have landlines in their homes. They hopped off the bus somewhere back down the road and decided that was enough. They were good right where they were. No need to continue to explore the world.

I respect that, to a point. I still don’t get the longing for the good old days thing, which while old, were never as rosy as we would like to portray them. Yes, it’s easy to slip into that fondness for a simpler past. When we were kids things did seem simpler, but only because our parents handled all the worries about the world, bills, house payments and savings. Our biggest decision of the day was whether we’d dig a hole or hop on our Stingray.

The world is still just as complex as it always has been. Things change, of course, as they should, but I find it hard to reconcile wanting to retreat into the optimized past than live in the often messy present.

The world is a danged amazing place if you take the time to be in it. If you’re brave enough, you jump on one of the horses on the outer edge of life’s carousel, the ones that not only go round-and-round, but up and down as well. The world flies by in a blur, but it’s absolutely exhilarating.

I can even accept it if you want to take a break, sitting on one of the benches that just go round and round, but not up and down. But to stand outside on the sidelines, just to watch things roll by? What the hell are people thinking?

When this happens, you know you’re just one step away from the grave. Security and safety have replaced your sense for adventure. You’re afraid to jump back on the horse, so you just stand there, living life as a spectator.

Quite frankly, it may just be time to pull the old plug. That way, you can be assured that the world around you won’t change anymore. You can choose your place and time and call it good. Check out of the old Living Life Hotel or jump off the bus and call it good. A life lived, but not necessarily a life lived well.

If you aren’t so quick to join the Daisy Pushers Club, then maybe you should ask why you’ve chosen to live in a rut. What made you stop enjoying life? What made you stop greeting the stranger next to you, preferring to wonder instead if he might be wearing a bomb? What made you fear life instead of love it, with all its quirks, dips and turns and ups and down?

If you want to live life as an old fogey, yearn for the halcyon days gone by, come to fear your own shadow, then go for it. Retreat into the walls of your safe little world and leave the rest of us alone.

And above all, don’t expect me to join you in your old fogeyism. I’m still out there writing checks I’ll never be able to cash and pushing the limits, albeit within slightly smaller boundaries than I had when I was 12 years old. Slighty, ever so slightly.

In the Emerald City, turning down my free tickets to the Old Fogey Hayride to Hell,

– Robb