Old School

When I was a kid adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were when they were growing up; what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning uphill both ways through year 'round blizzards carrying their younger siblings on their backs to their one-room schoolhouse where they maintained a straight-A average despite their full-time after-school job at the local textile mill where they worked for 35 cents an hour just to help keep their family from starving to death.

And I remember promising myself that when I grew up there was no way in hell I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on kids about how hard I had it and how easy they've got it.

But ...

Now that I've reached the ripe old age of thirty-four, I can't help but look around and notice the youth of today. You've got it so freakin' easy. I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a damned Utopia. And I hate to say it, but you kids today don't know how good you've got it.

I mean, when I was a kid we didn't have The Internet - when we wanted to know something, we had to go to the damned library and look it up ourselves. And there was no e-mail. We had to actually write somebody a letter -- with a pen -- and then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the freakin' mailbox and it would take like a week to get there.

And there were no MP3s or Napsters. You wanted to steal music, you had to go to the damned record store and shoplift it yourself. Or we had to Wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ'd usually talk over the beginning and screw it all up.

You want to hear about hardship? You couldn't just download porn. You had to bribe some homeless dude to buy you a copy of "Hustler" at the 7-11. It was either that or jackoff to the lingerie section of the JC Penney catalog. Those were your options.

We didn't have fancy things like Call Waiting. If you were on the phone and somebody else called, they got a busy signal. And we didn't have fancy Caller ID Boxes either. When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was. It could be your boss, your mom, a collections agent, your drug dealer, you didn't know. You just had to pick it up and take your chances, mister.

And we didn't have any fancy Game Cube videogames with high-resolution 3-D graphics - we had the Atari 2600. And you could tell who the rich kids were - they had Intellivision (and eventually ColecoVision). We didn't have Grand Theft Auto and Mortal Kombat ... we had games like "Space Invaders," "Pong Sports," and "Asteroids" - and the graphics sucked ass. Your guy was a little square. And there were no multiple levels or screens - it was just one screen ... forever. They didn't have any "How to Win at ... " books - if they did, "How to Win at Space Invaders" would be one line long - "Don't get shot." And you could never win; the game just kept getting harder and faster until you died. Just like LIFE.

When you went to the movie theater, there no such thing as stadium seating. All the seats were the same height. If a tall guy sat in front of you, you were screwed. And sure, we had cable television, but back then that was only like 20 channels and there was no onscreen menu. You had to use a little book called a "TV Guide" to find out what was on. And there was no Cartoon Network. You could only get cartoons on Saturday morning ... d'ya hear what I'm saying!?! We had to wait ALL WEEK, you spoiled little bastards.