I really liked this piece. I'm not sure how old you are, but as an elegy for youth it certainly rings true to me. While I'm still young at 26 years of age, in a city where nobody gets married until their mid thirties, I find myself waxing nostalgic for 21 and 22 and wondering if I should have modeled my life after those paragons of American youth I watch in The Hills and Gossip Girl.
But hindsight is twenty twenty, and the shimmering phosphorescent Los Angeles depicted in The Hills is no more real than my gilded memories of all the parties I should have gone to. What I do know is that at the time none of the beauty of youth was apparent to me, and a good deal of it probably still isn't. The freedom of rocketing down a mountainside on a snowboard with no regard for injury wasn't anything I yearned for because at the time I was only frustrated that I didn't have the stones to go down the even narrower avalanche chute. The grass was always greener and I think that's a lot of youth, going, to quote Daft Punk, harder, faster, better, stronger. And that's why getting old isn't all bad, because I like to think that the compulsion that blinds appreciation and reflection lessens and provides us with a little more peace.
This brings me to the reason I am looking forward to GTA IV. This isn't a game about a super human robot, or a young teenager with special abilities, but rather about a man on the precipice of middle age. A veteran in fact, of one of the more brutal wars in recent memory. This is a protagonist that, even though I have not played the game, already attracts me in a way that the superheroes I loved in adolesence no longer can. With this game comes my expectation that videogames have finally gotten their own Popeye Doyle and Michael Corleone - a truly adult protagonist. And I for one, am ready to move forward with the business of being an adult.
