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This year, people born in the year 1985 will turn 26 years old. They will get married, have kids, buy houses, and do all the other roots-planting stuff that people do when their 20s are 60 percent over. (They might also go out drinking a lot.) They will find it strange that their 10-year high school reunions are only two years away. (Though only in a marking-time sense; they won’t actually attend their reunions, because Facebook has turned high-school reunions into conventions of old-timey 20th-century life.) They will feel a strong twinge of nostalgia for the early ’00s, and trade lines from Napoleon Dynamite and Anchorman like their bosses at work drop references to—excuse them if they get these titles wrong—Ghostbusters and Caddyshack.
They are all grown up, but I’ll never see them that way. To me, anyone born the year that Back To The Future came out will always be The People That Are Too Young. I’m not sure when I decided that Michael J. Fox’s entrée to movie stardom was my personal Mendoza line for parsing out the generations. I acknowledge the inherent unreasonableness of my “Back To The Future Rule,” but I’ve been following it too long to stop now. I’m constitutionally unable to take people raised on Stars Wars prequels, Degrassi: The Next Generation, and MTV reality shows seriously, seeing as how they’ve been deprived of the bedrock values and education that you get from the original Star Wars films, the original Degrassi Junior High, and music videos—that’s right, music videos—on MTV.
"And I am old.
