A WEEK IN THE GHETTO OF YOUTH

Williamsburg, NY, like it's Va. counterpart, is a theme park. Instead of tourist dads in loud t-shirts and screaming kids, it's inhabitants are a mix of sling bag and funny hat wearing fashion victims and ultra hot men and women who look like they just stepped, fully pressed, from the pages of Vogue. Luckily for me, I was hanging with the later. But the one consistent theme in this park is youth. You'd think they checked proof at the bridge and the L line. "I'm sorry you were born before 1972. You'll have to turn around. I think the Lower East Side is still accepting your age group."
This 18-35 year old demographic may not be strictly enforced, but judging from the street and any of the many packed bars and restaurants it might as well be. I look like Alistair Cooke walking down the street. Oh, I'm sorry, you're too young to know who that is. How about Papa Smurf? Once in a while you can spot what look like parents from Bugfuck middle America, visiting the spawn and God bless 'em they look like frightened deer in the headlights. "And here's the tanning salon, and another coffee shoppe and oh yeah, that cheese shoppe is excellent! OOOOOOooooo Daddy can you buy me those shoes?" I pity any visiting parent without deep pockets. Talk about fear in the face of an impending recession.
It's nothing new for me to hang with people decades my junior. I dig them and as long as they don't throw rocks at me or poke me with a pointy stick, we're cool. I got plenty of storys from "back in the day" and for a grizzled fossil I can still hold my own when it comes to booze and drug intake. The disconcerting thing is seeing only youth in a large neighborhood. Heads down, text messaging, or cell phones glued to pretty ears, the area teems with an energy that is simutaneously frantic and completely lost. My presence is tolerated, so long as i don't make waves. I'm sure if I started to cough up lung or crapped my Depends someone in authority would put me on a bus and whisk me back upstate. For now I'm glad to be home with my cats and my slow internet connection. Someday they'll be a draft again. If I was a recruiter I know where I'd set up shoppe.