Cool (NOT!)

I’m now, at long last, self-aware and self-confident enough to acknowledge that I am not cool: not now, not then, likely not ever. My ability and willingness to embrace this truth, to take this first step on the path to self-acceptance and contentment, has been a long time coming. Who among us wants to admit that the world was right all along, that we are not, have not been, will never be cool, no matter what color we dye our hair, how tight we wear our jeans, how much we pay for the Scotch that gets us drunk?

I recently re-read the end-of-year messages in my high school yearbooks, from all my closest classmates – and some not so close. Not one said, “You are the coolest guy I know.” When I ran for Student Council President, I got three votes, as I recall: mine, of course (though I was iffy until the last minute), and two from unknown classmates who may not have been quite all there – or maybe just made mistakes marking their ballots.

And the letters I wrote in my early gay days, to a now departed friend (they came back to me after her departure) – not one includes the complaint, “I’m so cool the other gay boys are flocking around me tiresomely.” Though I did note a couple of chicken hawks, who must have had vision issues, since by then I was already long past chicken stage.

My cool quotient did not improve through the angst-filled thirties, thickening forties, flabbergasting fifties, or even the sixties, with their grim resignation heading toward retirement age.

 If cool is inexplicable magic, then we hold onto hope as long as we can, that, by some miracle, the magicians wand will someday tap our head. I can hold out hope for that no longer.

What a relief. I can now get on with the rest of life (what little of it there may be left), freed from the obsession to strive for cool – or even coolish. I can now accept that I’m going to be uncool right down to my final breath, that even my last words are unlikely to be cool – a far cry from those John Adams whispered on July 4, 1826: “Thomas Jefferson survives.” Though arguably Adams too was a little lacking in cool; if he’d used Twitter, Facebook or even email, as all cool people must, he’d have known that Jefferson had died some hours earlier.

I wonder if the cool people know what a blessing they’ve received – completely unearned for most of them, it looks to me, since they don’t seem to have any trouble being cool – they just are. I, who worked at it for decades (or at least worried over not being it – which is also work),  deserve it much more than they – in a just world, that is. But there they are cool, and here I am not cool. Is that just?

For instance, Patti Smith. Who really is Patti Smith, anyway? We are contemporaries almost, living through the same post-war boomer disillusion and rebellion of the 1960s, the same drug and sex fueled dissipation of the  1970s, the same reevaluation and recovery of the 1980s, two peas in a pod – except, of course, that she isn’t an old gay white guy and I’m not an influential “singer, songwriter, poet, painter, and author,” which, according to Wikipedia, she is. But otherwise, two peas in a pod. So why has she been blessed with cool, and me, not? Is that fair? (Forgive me, Ms. Smith, if I project on you my own disappointments and dissipations, which were not also yours; I really know nothing about you. For my purposes here, you are simply the prototype of my-generation cool.)

But enough with that. I’m now ready to just be myself, to let the cool chips fall where they will – or, more likely, won’t. And, in fact, ever the Pollyanna, I now see my uncool life as not completely negative. I now realize that cool doesn’t last anyway. One generation’s cool counts for nothing to the next and the next – until, sometimes, a mysterious return to cool takes place (more cool magic?) when most of the original cool cats are long gone. 1970s fashion, for example (see the attached photo of me in cool 70s fashion as proof).

What was once cool sags sadly as time goes by, like tats on wilting torsos, forty years after the inking. I’m so uncool that I never got a tattoo, if you can believe it . I obfuscated about this uncool absence for decades, but now I can own it. I am tat free; I had no inking; I am brazenly, defiantly uncool, always have been, always will be, and proud of it.  So there.

But when you think about it, how cool is that, me using terms like “tat” and “inking” sort of off handedly, as though I hadn’t just picked them up from a Google search? Maybe all hope of cool, for me, is not lost after all! Magic wand of cool, I am ready, at long last. Tap me now. PLEASE! Before it’s too late.