COLUMN: This isn't ending well

By Tobin Barnes 
Let’s face facts. Lay our cards on the table…all that stuff.
 
Life is disappointing.
 
Even when you think things are going to be neat, they don’t turn out to be as neat as when you first thought they would be.
 
For example, I just know I’m headed for a big disappointment with the TV show “Lost.” That’s the only possible resolution of finding yourself lost in this galloping enigma of a series. (Of course, that last statement is a major paradox, but it’s just jam-packed with essential truth, if you think about it.)
 
I’ve been on and off with that show throughout the years of its run. It has pulled me in and then pushed me away.
 
That’s because it’s an evil tease. And that’s because anything can happen. Literally.
 
Even dead people can come back to life…many times! Characters are supposedly living parallel lives, for crying out loud. You have no idea if anything is for real. It drives you nuts.
 
Why do I put myself through this agony of being jerked around by this monstrously erratic pot-boiler? My wife smartened up long ago and doesn’t watch it anymore. So why do I persist? Why am I religiously watching the last “Lost” episodes?
 
Heck, they probably aren’t even the last episodes. There’s sure to be a prequel after the end…or maybe a movie…or even a prequel-sequel combo.
 
I just know I’m going to be disappointed.
 
Here I am, poor naïf, waiting for all the pieces to come together, and I know I’m going to be left with a big cornball explanation instead. The show implies that there’s some Einsteinian undercurrent to all the weird island madness, but you got to know that it’s all going to turn out to be a flimflam of Daffy Duck proportions.
 
I know I’m going to be disappointed. Just you wait and see.
 
And while we’re at it, here’s another thing that disappoints me. (Yeah, I’ve got a list.)
 
It really irritates me that the music of my youth has become elevator music. The 60’s and early 70’s stuff: I hear it in the background all over the place now. It’s become mood music.
 
It’s the vanilla ice cream of tunes. In my last days in the nursing home I’m going to hear “Born to Be Wild” piped into the sitting room speakers. I knew that this was going to happen when they started using Led Zeppelin songs to sell Cadillacs some years ago.
 
When it first came out, my music was the rocky road of ice creams with big chunks of stuff throughout it that made adults think the world was going to hell in a hand basket.
 
It was totally different from the adult music of Frank Sinatra, Andy Williams, and Tennessee Ernie Ford—one of the many reasons we loved it. It was hell’s-a-poppin’ music that freaked Ed Sullivan and encouraged mothers to hide their children.
 
It inspired young people to abandon socks. (What a rebellious step that was. It drove principals crazy. Admittedly, that movement never made much sense, but there you go. Exactly what I’m talking about.)
 
Buzzcuts and Brylcreem disappeared almost overnight. It brought about the sign, “No shirt, no shoes, no service.” It defined our cultural enemies to be “rednecks.” And it helped stop a war.
 
Now it’s the preferred rotation on Muzak.
 
This transition of my music has declared me officially old, thank you very much. I might as well be awarded a certificate.
 
What a disappointment.