I'M HURTLING toward 40 at an incredible rate of speed. Hindsight is telescoping behind me like a focus-zoom in a Hitchcock flick. I can see myself over 25 years ago: a confused teenager is staring back, befuddled by the idea that I, and the music I love, would ever become old, and the people making that music could be seen as irrelevant dinosaurs.

The Geto Boys are thumping around my imminent future, two angry T-rexes and a nasty little velociraptor. They are legendary monsters of hiphop. I am excited at the idea of seeing them. Why not? Dr. Alan Grant was excited to see Jurassic Park, too.

It'll be weird, seeing the Hawthorne Theatre filled with a bunch of 30- to 50-year-olds, singing along to "Mind Playing Tricks on Me," surrendering to the dumb, rebellious teenager hidden inside that still thinks Scarface was a legitimately good movie; the kid impressed by the album cover to We Can't Be Stopped because it features Bushwick Bill with his eye shot out.

It'll be weird, hearing songs from their 1990 Rick Rubin-produced major-label debut, the one with an extra content warning next to the regular parental advisory, thanks to all the mutilating, raping, and necrophilia going on in the lyrics.

I can safely revel in that stupidity, if I want. I can go back in time, like Dr. Grant boarding Hammond's helicopter. It's enticing as hell, until you're reminded, as Dr. Grant was, why they're dinosaurs, that things go extinct for a fuckin' reason, and maybe they should stay that way.

Maybe.

But then again, if there's any truth the Geto Boys ever spit into a microphone, it's a truth so universal that it could appear in something as far removed from Houston's Fifth Ward as Office Space, and it would still shine bright as the Texas sun:

Damn, it feels good to be a gangster.