Old People Plus Peter Quint, You Devil!

I watched a fluffy, 10-year-old movie called The Intern.

I liked it! Robert DeNiro plays a grandfatherly 70-year-old who gets recruited as an—auk!—intern at an e-commerce startup run by the ever-dazzling Anne Hathaway. (In another life, she married Shakespeare!)

It's a charming movie in many ways, though not without massive holes in its script.

But the parts that fascinated me, of course, were the interactions between DeNiro and the e-commerce Millennials.

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Old people really are a separate human species to young people. Kinda like Neanderthals.

The media—and the American culture at large that media curates—tries to disguise this fact by positioning it as a generational clash, Boomers versus Millennials. But I don't think the clash has anything to do with demographic characterizations. I think it's simply that young people do not like old people. Young people think old people smell bad, have weird teeth, are ugly with all those receding hairlines, wrinkles, crepe neck, & unsightly hair sproutings.

Worst of all, old people are needy: Ancient Mariner-like, they are constantly trying to collar young people to explain to them what it was like back-in-the-day even though back-in-the-day is totally irrelevant to young people because they hadn't been born yet so, properly speaking, the world did not exist.

When Millennials hit 70, Generation Beta & Generation Delta will find plenty of excuses not to like them, too.

Young people would prefer not to interact with old people.

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Of course, this is hugely relevant to me as a 73-year-old person searching for housing.

As I have bored all 4.3 of my readers by repeating numerous times, I like living with other people. But since collective households are mostly a phenomenon found in people under 40, do other people like living with me?

There are numerous threads on Reddit: Would you want a Boomer as a roommate?

You know they'd try to "take charge" of the house, writes one Redditor. Sorry old man, you had all the economic advantages of growing up in the strongest economy and now you're at my level? Yeah, no, I'm not taking your advice, you had a headstart and flubbed it, the only reason I'd listen to you is so I know what not to do. (Seven upvotes.)

Writes another: WTF? Who would want to run an adult daycare just for the cost of rent? Pull up your bootstraps and take care of yourselves boomers. (23 upvotes.)

I don't even know what to feel when I read stuff like that.

Old people are definitely the one marginalized class that it is absolutely politically correct to dump on.

There should be some satisfaction in knowing that sooner or later, everyone—including those Reddit posters!—is gonna be a member of that marginalized class.

But when that happens, I'll most likely be dead. So, there isn't.

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In other news...

Yesterday: Remuneration, gym.

Sky was totally opaque with the smoke from the Canadian wildfires.

There is a moment in Henry James's novella The Turn of the Screw where the nameless protagonist—the reader is never sure whether she is mad or ghost-sensitive—glances up at a tower in the Gothic house to which she has been dispatched to serve as governess to two charming but very peculiar children.

The governess sees—or thinks she sees—a man standing on the tower. He leers at her—and the day just...stops... The sky turns dead white, the birds stop singing, and though he is 500 feet away, the governess sees the features of the man's face as clearly as though he were standing next to her.

Peter Quint, you devil! the little boy in the governess's charge cries at the end of the novella before promptly dropping dead.

Though it's never clear whether the little boy also sees the man in the tower that the governess is forcing him to see, and whether you devil is a description of the governess or Peter Quint.

Anyway, yesterday was a Peter Quint, you devil! kinda day.