When I was a kid…
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’m over the ripe old age of thirty, I can’t help but look
around and notice the youth of today. You’ve got it so easy! I mean,
compared to my childhood, you live in a damn Utopia! And I hate to say it
but you kids today you don’t know how good you’ve got it! I mean,
when I was a kid we didn’t have The Internet. If we wanted to know
something, we had to go to the damn library and look it up
ourselves, in the card catalog!!
There was no email! We had to actually write somebody! a letter
with a Pen! Then you had to walk all the way across the street
and put it in the mailbox and it would take like a week to get
there!
There were no MP3’s or Napsters! You wanted to steal music, you
had to hitchhike to the damn record store and shoplift it yourself! Or
you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ’d
usually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up!
And talk of about hardship? You couldn’t just download porn! You
had to steal it from your brother or bribe some homeless dude to buy
you a copy of “Hustler” at the 7-11! Those were your options!
We didn’t have fancy crap like Call Waiting! If you were on the
phone and somebody else called they got a busy signal, that’s it! 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 school, your mom, your
boss, your bookie, your drug dealer, a collections agent, you just
didn’t know!!! You had to pick it up and take your chances, mister!
We didn’t have any fancy Sony Playstation video games with
high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games
like “Space Invaders” and “Asteroids” and the graphics sucked ass!
Your guy was a little square! You actually had to use your
imagination! And there were no multiple levels or screens,
it was just one screen forever! And you could never win. The game just kept getting
harder and harder and faster 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 or
some old broad with a hat sat in front of you and you couldn’t see,
you were just screwed!
Sure, we had cable television, but back then that was only like
15 channels and there was no onscreen menu and no remote control!
You had to use a little boo! k called a TV Guide to find out what was on!
You were screwed when it came to channel surfing! You had to get off
your ass and walk over to the TV to change the channel and there was
no Cartoon Network either! You could only get cartoons on Saturday
Morning. Do you hear what I’m saying!?! We had to wait ALL WEEK
for cartoons, you spoiled little bastards!
And we didn’t have microwaves, if we wanted to heat something up
we had to use the stove or go build a frigging fire .. imagine
that! If we wanted popcorn, we had to use that stupid Jiffy Pop thing
and shake it over the stove forever like an idiot. That’s exactly
what I’m talking about! You kids today have got it too easy. You’re
spoiled.
You guys wouldn’t have lasted five minutes back in 1980.
