Pop Stars Need To Get Older 'Cos I'm Starting To Hate Myself

Hello, I’m Ryan. I work a shitty day job and in between serving yuppies caramel macchiatos and wiping smeared ketchup off plates, I daydream and fanboy over today’s musicians. I’ll probably never get to share a milkshake with Kanye West or play dress up with Lady Gaga, but I would like to be able to ask Justin Timberlake to start "bringing sexy back". 

I’ve been getting old for a while now. I wish I could put a stop to it. The older I get, the more pressure there is to have actively achieved something. Despite my arguments with my landlord, a blog post on a website doesn’t pay the rent. Adjectives aren’t legal tender. I get nostalgic and depressed whenever anyone plays that fucking Baz Luhrmann song and I can’t help but think how being young was way better. Toddlers don’t get P45s. They get someone to wipe their bum for them.

At the age of 14 I played in a band. I chose bass because it’s easy and you don’t have to do much. We were called Maths Watch!!! and we wrote a song with the lyrics – “legs like sticks, she likes the dicks”. It was about an emaciated, yet beautiful, goddess who knew about Woody Allen films and liked Bob Dylan. She made the track her profile song on MySpace and I felt like we were on our way to stardom. It felt like we were going to make it.

I was in my early teens and today felt like a lifetime away. I thought that by now, I’d be living in an apartment in Manhattan cooking paella for a young Kirsten Dunst and Cameron Diaz. I’d swap jumpers with James Franco and in the evening I’d watch Road Wars with a stoned Jake Gyllenhall. Sandy Cohen would sing Hit Me With Your Best Shot at my wedding. Maccauley Culkin would be page boy.

This never happened, of course. My band didn’t leave the garage. Instead, I make excel documents about gas payments and cry into overmicrowaved ready meals, sobbing because my parents don’t know what web 2.0 is and they can’t be proud of me.

I’m bitter and I’m going to blame it on the pop stars.

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