The Kids of Today

I could blame it on my birthday or I could be more honest and admit that, a bottle of Shiraz followed by three post dinner ports was not conducive to safe driving. The Express bus, ferrying myself, half a dozen other anaesthetised souls and a rowdy gaggle of school children over the Harbour Bridge, was my punishment for abandoning my car the previous night.

The children were agitated, exuberant and comfortable in their seats. I was feeling opposite in every way. I had no comforting seat beneath me, to hold my heavy somnambulant frame. I was grimly grasping the rail as if the bus door could open at any moment and I would be sucked out to certain death.. When we young, we were trained to feel the pain of our elders and help them accordingly, give them our seat in a selfless love of older age. That, and the fear of a good clip round the ear if our teachers or worse still our parents had discovered our rudeness.

“Listen to this!” one of them called grabbing a wire from their ear and pressing it to that of their neighbor. “ I just love Twister, he is so cute”.

And I thought music was about listening. The neighbor was alive and asked if she could copy the song to her iPod after school. I thought about starting a debate on the evils of piracy but suspected some other new and expensive gadget might be produced to render me unconscious.

I was surely already invisible. Perhaps it was the accessories I didn't have. The Dirty Dog sunglasses, the Billabong school bag, the iPod obviously. If these children had not been in school colors, I wondered what designer clothes names would be displayed.

“Shut the &%) up”, a nice young man opined to the girls in front of him, his mouth open to expose his chewing gum. I wondered if Clark Gable ever spoke to Olivia de Havilland with such erudition and manners. I did not catch the reply other than a loud “off”. I filled in the gaps. After years of breaking down the barriers to good communication ensuring we were all equal, I felt any wall was now a crumbled mound of slivers and dust.

“ I can't. I've got to go with Mum to get my hair done after school”, another fragment of verse caught me, thrown by a girl with short over colored hair.

“ Grables in town” I presumed was the answer to where.

“ It is so cool”. I could see all the important facts about a hair stylist were so carefully considered by the consumer generation.

Thankfully the bus lanes were doing their job and our journey was going to be brief if not sweet. My ears were already suffering from the constancy of the jabber, the loudness, the domination of the surroundings. Be seen and be heard, an interesting twist on what I had been taught.

“No! My science teacher is a dick head. He is so boring”.

What was that? Something I could understand. Maybe the kids of today were not so different after all.