The next person who comforts me with the words. “You’re only as old as you feel,“ I am going sucker punch.

I am an old Southerner. This makes me a complete alien to the Youth Culture. I have gained many years and much experience and that is one reason I presume to speak.

It makes me SICK to see someone older trying to fit in with the young folks, to be cool, to use the lingo. It reminds me of a transvestite.

In fact it only recently occurred to me that almost nobody today would call his statements “porch talk,” because that means he is definitely older. I suppose they’d be rappin’ with the other young folks, as young as they feel.

The world NEEDS older folks. You don’t hand down your experience and your culture by acting like it’s the same thing every young person hears regularly from other young people. Why the hell would they want to hear a bad imitation of their friends?

BGlass was a little put out with me when I described her as he. I also had no idea that she was so young. Neither makes any difference. In this case, though I am loathe to admit it, I am really not prejudiced. BGlass impresses the hell out of me, and would do so if she was a 50-year-old he.

Most of the people who talk endlessly about “reaching the young people” have the sort of exchange with young people that I have with BGlass and the relatively aged BoardAd. In BUGS you make sense or you don’t.

To me, being older is a QUALIFICATION, not a handicap. There are a lot of things an older person can tell you that a younger person can’t. There’s damned little that an older person who is trying to be hip can say that would be worth a young person’s time to listen to.

I don’t know if SF still has a photograph section any more. I thought it was a wonderful defiance of the Thought Police. I would also comment on the pretty girls. Several people, male and female, enjoyed my jokes.

I said, “I LOVE Stormfront! Where else can an old man drool over pictures of pretty girls and get COMPLIMENTED for it?”

I was raised in a society where old folks had a place, a very GOOD place, a very HONORED place. In a society, I mean in a REAL society, we have always been a critical, indispensable part of the continuum. I can’t think of it any other way, and I’m glad of that.

It must be AWFUL to think that every year you live makes you less qualified to Fit In. I am being one of the old folks I admired and listened to on the porch, and it is an honor.