If thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.

 

We were expected to progress from being Students.

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Originally, it was an immersion experience within the minds of people already farther along than ourselves. We were assigned to them. We had to learn how to deal with their behaviors.

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We had to untangle their outward personae, their usually blended multiple roles. Spiritual Leaders, Scientists, Coaches, Comics. Bad Bosses. Parents. Blended, like a salad. Or a smoothie. Or the wobbly surface of a shimmering rainbow oil slick.

 

Our job was to figure out what the actual hell they were doing, and when they were going to do it again. As the Brits would say, sort it.

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For them, it was evangelism shrink-wrapped in Tough Love.

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You know the drill. And, it worked. We were newbies, then we were nervous, and then we were confident. But they could have made it even clearer that we were going to be on our own pretty soon - say, from July '76 to forever. That would have helped.

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The struggle was real. It wasn't just us.

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In 1976, Kodak was on its way to ignoring its own invention, the digital camera, and flushing its empire down the toilet. ARPANET was seven years old, but it still usually crashed. Young Al Gore, 28 years old, had not yet decided to invent the internet, and while he was snoozing, Robert Kahn, Vincent Serf and Tim Berners-Lee did it. So then, about 1990, the world-wide-lightbulb came on and began invalidating most cultural mythologies that relied on Being Clueless About What The Other Guys Were Doing.

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Parenthetically, so much for the Avante-Garde.

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We're less clueless now. For one thing, looking back on the span during 1976 to1990, we know that whether you lost or kept your innocence, you hit age 35.

At 35 one's “youth” is, arguably, spent.

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If you spent all of it in the same place -- for example, on what you were thinking in 1976 -- what you thought then that you’d be making at 35 might be what you actually were making at 35.

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We don’t know anyone that tried that and got away with it.

We didn't even try.

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So. Many. Distractions.

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Love, debt, cable TV, computers, therapy.

Infamy. Acts of God. Debt. Health. Cognitive dissonance. Debt.

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Propagating the species.

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Debt.

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Darwin was right. Or, not so much.

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They say that people don’t evolve. Instead, populations evolve; people change. 

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As a cohort, anything we had in common with each other in 1976 was not a predictor of where we would wind up.

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Instead, '76 was a historical reference point, from which we fanned out; and later, that fan sprouted more fans. Some faded, folded or failed under the pressure and fine-grained abrasion of unrelated oncoming events. Some morphed; some survived. Yes. Exactly. Like butterflies in a sand storm. I know, that’s what you were thinking. Right on.

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Reconvening our gang now after forty-five years meant suddenly discovering our group evolution, and asking the core Zoom-meeting question, “What Us Are We?”

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Well, wherever we went, here we are.

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So, the answer was, let's find out. Put some stuff up in front of each other and then in front of you. Jam session. It's all good, dude.

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Our advice to the class of 2021:

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Revel in the intensity of your teachers and the moment.

Respect your rivals as siblings.

Embrace “ensemble” as a default.

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When you have an explosively great idea, let it rip, then either let go of it, or dabble in having an agent. Either way, try to obtain copyright first.

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Consider, and accept, income.

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Also: teach and protect children.

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And have standards; don’t use words like “irregardless”. Don’t say “new-cue-lar”, ever, anywhere, for any reason. And, eschew bad food when you can.

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