by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

I'm feeling Hold about Montreal. Hold is the word for the faucet that should sit between Hot and Cold. Hold is also the feeling you get when you're simultaneously Hot and Cold, when your boots are wet but your hat is steaming.

On the Cold side, I'm peeved that disaster is falling here like leaves: we've lost the Expos; the god of hockey has forsaken us; we're being spurned by Hollywood; the Shriners, Molson, the Film Festival and Bombardier are all uncertain messes and Gilles Duceppe still seems to be kicking around.

On the other hand, I'm Hot on the city because I like the people here. However, there's an impending disaster hovering over our people. Unless Quebec swiftly raids every orphanage in the solar system, we'll soon be a creaky bunch of nagging crows. As our Premier explained at a recent conference on demographics, we had eight workers per retiree in the 70s. We now have five workers, and by 2031 we'll have just two.

There's an impending culture clash, an imminent Armageddon of intergenerational relations. Workers will resent handing over their entire paycheques to fund the gerontocracy and then have to suffer through fogeyish easy listening classics on every radio station in the car home.

The culture that we know and love will die painfully. There'll be fewer local bands and more cranky old timers complaining about the noise.

When Turntable Dan spins LPs, instead of the thousands of rapt admirers, he'll be lucky to attract a few dozen, while the bingo hall across the street overflows with geriatrics crowing, "What number did he say?" and crawling under tables searching for lost cardigan buttons.

Old people and young people live in different worlds; it's our unspoken social apartheid.

For example: the elderly never form punk bands. You can travel the world with a backpack and meet everything from Swedes to Chileans but you'll never cross the white-running-shoe-clad doddering set. They travel together in separate tour buses. The guy rolling the doobie on the bunk at the end of the youth hostel (an ageist term if ever there was one!) could be anything, an Oz or a Swede, but he won't be an old geezer.

Nor do old timers try their hand at spoken word or open mic comedy nights, and I never yet had to compete with a 75-year-old for the last beer at a house party. Nor have I witnessed anybody's granny attempt Whitney on the karaoke downtown. And wish though you might, there's no senior attempting a triple axle at the local rink.

Old folks are invisible. I live near a big old seniors' complex. You never see anybody come in or out except Mr. Mellows, a retired cop from Trinidad. He rings our doorbell and goes on walks with my wife. He might be cruising her, it's hard to tell. When they return he sticks his head in my office and annoyingly says, "You really should get out there and find some stories for your articles."

"Go write your own damn articles!" I almost reply.

Perhaps the elderly are lazy or maybe they're inhibited by our ageist prejudices. Notice how the same stunts that are endearing when performed by a young person seem decrepit when done by somebody old enough to know better? If a drunk frat kid walks shirtless down Ste-Catherine on a cold winter's night, we consider it boyishly charming. Do it when you're 73 years old (as my father once did) and people might be less tickled.

The elderly need a behavioural revolution. They need to garden less and rock more. They should live on the edge because they have less to lose. If anybody should experiment with drugs, it's the elderly; they have less of a future to ruin. The golden years are an ideal time to embark on enjoyable criminal activities like counterfeiting or smuggling because judges will be more lenient and nobody will care if you have a criminal record because you won't be going to many job interviews by then anyway.

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca