When you’re 53ish and reading Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl you find yourself wanting to give away all of your crap and move to Philly and hang out with your punk/goth kid and listen to all of the punk/goth music for awhile and do nothing else at all.
And then you might feel like after your kid is sick of you and you’re sick of Philly that it would be a good time to move onto the Pacific Northwest and hang out with another kid and see if you can figure out where all the cool indie musicians hang out and just listen to whatever it is that might be cool now.
At which point you realize that you don’t actually know what kinds of indie music might be cool and whether there is any cool indie music going on anywhere because you’re old now and you have all of these responsibilities and you have dogs, for godsakes (though Carrie has dogs, too, now… which by the way, the almost last chapter of the book comes at you from nowhere and you won’t be prepared for what happens and it might make you feel kind of ill and stuff… just warning you. You should still read the book… where was I?)
Oh yea, which then causes you to think maybe you should just put the book down, turn Sleater-Kinney up really loud and make a zine, which causes you to laugh your ass off because you can’t even manage to write anything decent on your own blog (or anywhere) or paint in your art journal or really do anything except work and think about mortgages and crap.
Which causes you to kind of be annoyed that you missed all of the cool stuff that happened in the 90s because you were busy raising kids and working, working, working — always working.
Whatever. You still have Sleater-Kinney to listen to. And there are some old zines on your bookshelves (or if you’re me, they’re packed in a box but will be back on your bookshelves someday…assuming the mortgage all works out, lol.) And you can listen to your goth/punk kids’ music any damn time you want and even sometimes listen to her playlist for her DJ gig. And… that will be enough. Mostly.
Read Carrie’s book. And listen to some Sleater-Kinney.