Rock-a-bye, grown up.

Once you hit your twenties, you will find that as the years edge you closer to thirty the frequency of events that force you to act like a grown up and make sensible decisions will increase. It is your basic line graph, really. When these little situations occur, you are forced to think about how it is inevitable that you will actually eventually become a real live grown up.

Not all of these events are necessarily big in significance. On the weekend, Dave and I were hanging out and playing Scrabble. When we play Scrabble, we usually like to have a soundtrack to accompany the game. On this particular evening, it was 4 separate Rolling Stones albums. We got to talking about how much we both love the Stones, and how we had both only really started to appreciate them in recent years.

It is because the Rolling Stones is what you listen to when you are coming to grips with the fact that you are growing up.

When I was in high school, I was all about the Beatles. This makes perfect sense. When you are in high school you are thinking about how great life is going to be when you get out into the world and really start to discover things. The music of the Beatles has a sort of whimsy to it... when you listen to it, it is all kind of just lovely and magical. It makes you think of hopes and dreams.

Then when you are heading into your mid-twenties, you start having to deal with things. You have to make choices. You have to work, you have to make money, and you have to pay the darn rent. You start to realise that life is real. Life is sometimes messy and dirty. It is around this time that you start to discover the Rolling Stones.

The Stones are not about hopes and dreams. The Stones are about wants and needs. They have a grittiness to them that you can't really understand fully until you are a bit older and have seen a little more. When you are twenty-something, you don't want to sit back and imagine. You want to frigging rock. You want dirty, real rock. I think the anthem of my twenties so far has been, "You Can't Always Get What You Want". The older I get, the more I understand how true that really is.

Don't get me wrong, I still love the Beatles. I always will. The Beatles are all about love, and sometimes that's nice to hear. But the Stones? They aren't about love. You know what they are about. Right now, hot, sweaty, sexy rock music is just far more appealing.

I don't have time to dream anymore... I only have time to rock. Get 'er done.