I’ve written a lot over the last year or two about coming to terms with getting older. It’s one of those things we all have to come to terms with. Of course, the world is remarkably good at coming up with all kinds of reminders of one’s (relatively) advanced age: little aches and pains, graying or thinning hair, meeting someone at a party who seems like a grown-up and finding out that they were born your freshman year of college…the universe has a bit of a sense of humor.

Usually, I’m okay with growing old gracefully kicking and screaming; despite a few chronic things, I’m in the best shape of my life since I was in my early twenties, and occasionally find myself in the pleasant position of being able to share some of my aged wisdom with the younger generation without coming off as completely disconnected from their life experience. Finding myself entering early-middle age mostly intact and comfortable isn’t all that bad.

Sometimes, though, I hear something on the radio that drives home exactly how long I’ve been kicking around the planet in denial. This morning, I heard a news piece on the radio about this year’s inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a group which includes, among others:

Guns N’ Roses, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, and The Beastie Boys.

Guns N’ Roses put out Appetite For Destruction in 1987; as such, it provided much of the soundtrack for my time in high school. Let’s look at the implications of that sentence: bands that first broke when I was entering high school are now eligible for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I suppose I should be thankful that Gn’R was inducted in their first year of eligibility, or else I’d feel really old.

It actually gets worse, at least subjectively. Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Beastie Boys, despite forming and releasing their first albums in the early-to-mid eighties, didn’t really gain fame and reach their creative peaks until the early-to-mid 90s, when I was kind of off exploring strange new genres (coughcountrycough) and digging into the local scene, planting them firmly in the category of “bands kids younger than me listened to,” are also being inducted. So, not only is the soundtrack of my teenage years being more or less classified as nostalgia, the stuff that came after that is being filed there as well.

Time, it seems, keeps marching on. Here’s to hoping life is still interesting on the nostalgia circuit.