Forever Young

I had a conversation the other day with someone I have not conversated in some time. Come to find out, he’s a subscriber to this here modest blog and has been reading since day one. A friend I obtained during the “Great Online Game Gatherings” of the late 2000’s. A time when the strongest friendship bonds we had were with people we had never and most likely will never meet. Some of those friendships I still maintain today and a few of which I have actually met in person. One of them I actually lived with for a time; he was also a friend who was lost to COVID when the lockdowns were at their worst.

This particular friend started his conversation with a Facebook Messenger note that read, “Hey Eric! Just wanted to check on ya and see if you’re still blogging.”

This caused me to take a pause and ask myself the same question.

I am. At least, I mean to be. I’m still stuck in that seemingly never-ending “I’ll do it tomorrow” rut that I can’t seem to crawl out of. My biggest excuse being that I’m having a hard time finding a topic that wont depress the hell out of everyone, yet again.

Anyway, I took Chris’ inquiry as the nudge I needed and decided to see what I could find to write about that would be both entertaining and relevant and get some of ya’ll to leave a comment or two so I at least feel like there is some interaction here. While I’m on the subject, if you are into movie reviews, please check out Chris’ blog at The Film Legacy. Chris is a talented writer and has even accomplished what has always been a dream of mine, he writes for a living. Chris, not much more than a child when I met him online, is now all grown up with a beautiful wife and 2 year old daughter and seems to be living his dream.

If you have ever asked yourself what my goal is with this blog and my writing, it is, first and foremost, an outlet for what haunts my brain. It gives me a temporary escape from that which I can’t seem to evict from my head. It’s also a place for me to express my own creativity and be real. I ignore all the SEO bullshit that WordPress seems to be bound and determined to force on me whether I want it or not. I have a built-in “SEO Headline Analyzer” score. This post, for example, scores a whopping 28/100. Apparently this means Google won’t like me very much. In true Gen X fashion, I have no fucks to give. I’m not an AI clickbait machine trying to get the high score in how many morons can I get to mindlessly click on my posts. I’m a real person, with real feelings and real relevant shit to talk about. I write as if I am actually speaking to you. I don’t follow any set format or journalistic rules. I could go on, but I don’t think I could put it in better words than Chris did in his post, The Growing Contempt for Human Creativity. Read it after you finish this one, of course. I’m not trying to send you away. You’re all I’ve got.

At any rate, I needed to write. Whether I wanted to or not, but I needed something that would improve my mood.

I chose to get on the interwebs and search “writing prompts for bloggers” and there were a-plenty. A lot of them irrelevant to anything that I know or will know and therefore, useless as writing prompts. Then there were the sappy “describe your greatest achievement” or “talk about the person you admire the most”, yadda yadda.

The one that caught my eye and kept dragging me back was “write about your opinion of the world”.

I immediately thought, “What could possibly go wrong with that?!”

Yeah, that made me laugh too.

I could see that turning into a political and spiritual tirade that would either make me go viral or completely alienate those of you that do stick around and read my brain-spew and drive my work into absolute oblivion. Given that my brother’s paintings are about to be on display at a big art show up in Brooklyn, I can’t afford for my art to disappear into the abyss.

So I tossed that around in my brain a little bit to see if I could turn it into something less . . . . emotionally charged is the only way I can describe that. After about 30 minutes of mulling it over, I turned it into “what does it mean to be Gen X”.

I can do that without offending too many people.

Except maybe Chris the Millennial.

There are a lot of different organizations that define the years that qualify Gen X within different parameters. I qualify according to all of them but we’ll go with my current arch-enemy, The Social Security Administration’s definition as those born between 1964 and 1979. Those of us who spent our formative teen years in the 80’s and 90’s. Every generation thinks they are the best generation.

Gen X is the only one that can prove it.

We are the bridge generation, between the old world and the new. Between no internet and internet. Between phone on the wall in your house and phone in every. damn. bodies. pocket.

To all those Boomer math teachers that told us we wouldn’t be walking around with a calculator all the time . . . go fuck yourself. We walk around with more in our pocket than any of you could have even imagined. Not only do we have a calculator in our pocket, we’ve got the whole fuckin’ library in there, and then some. I will comfortably say that most Gen X’ers would freak the fuck out if they lost their phone now, that’s just the world we transitioned into.

But we remember.

We remember our moms popping in on our “private” phone calls because the only phone we had was one we shared with everyone in the house.

We remember not having a thing to do in the house so we went outside and pretty much all hell broke loose at that point, because our parents only cared that we were out of the house and not in front of the “idiot box” or TV as we called that 700 pound piece of furniture in the family room. We took off into the woods, played in the creek, shot at each other with BB guns.

Goggles and safety equipment? Now you’re just being funny. “Safety equipment” meant wearing a second sweatshirt and a pair of jeans under your sweat pants. Eyes were protected only by the “no aiming for the face” rule.

Our social lives were entirely dependent on school. That’s where we met our friends, boyfriends, girlfriends, friends that would last a lifetime and friends that wouldn’t last the afternoon. There were a couple other options for making friends, boy/girl scouts or unsavory characters we met at the arcade, but our friendship circles largely revolve around school. Of course their were the neighbor kids on our street that we played kickball with, built forts in the woods with or shot BB’s at, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes not, but we went to school with all those kids too so I’m going to leave them in the school category.

We rode our bikes down to the mall to just hang out at Record Bar or Sam Goodies, or we spent every quarter we could scrape up shoving them into, pretty much the only video games most of us had, Tempest, Centipede, Galaga, Paperboy and Pole Position. There was always a line waiting for Pole Position because that was the cool “sit-down” game with a steering wheel and pedals. At home, the closest thing we had to this was Pong that we could play on our very own idiot box.

Until Atari came along.

This, my friends, was the earliest beginning of the end of the non-technology era.

I kinda divide Gen X into 2 groups. Those who spent their teens in the 80’s with another group for the 90’s. I feel like the 90’s kids had moved a little further into the “tech” age than us 80’s kids did, but they still remember the “non-tech” or maybe less tech times. I turned 21 in 1989, so I’m a solid 80’s kid. I went to school dances and football games. I passed notes to girls I liked in that super cool way we used to fold them. That was our texting. Notes folded like someone tried to make a paper airplane, failed and then said “fuck it”.

I still remember how to do that, by the way.

Hell, remember having notebook paper?

My girlfriend (when I got one) wore Add-A-Beads.

It may seem like there really wasn’t a lot going on back then, but in truth, there was a shit-ton going on, we just didn’t have a phone to record every single thing we did of every moment of every day. We lived in the moment we had. We went to concerts like VanHalen, Pink Floyd, Motley Crue, Rolling Stones and a gazillion others and we bragged of our adventures by word of mouth because cameras weren’t allowed into concerts. Entire romances began and ended at school dances, football games or when they had time between classes because the only way to communicate was face to face or in the evenings on your shared phone line at home. We found our cliques at school because there were fewer then. Everybody was either a stoner, nerd, prep or jock. I fell into the nerd with stoner-like tendencies category. Hard core AV Club/Pep Club material but didn’t mind burning a bowl and tossing back some brews (or a bottle of Boone’s Farm) when some came available.

My best friend was a dedicated Southern Baptist who often said he prayed for me.

It didn’t work but I appreciated his effort.

Girlfriend, also Baptist, also prayed for me, also didn’t work.

I still became the glorious heathen you now read before you.

On into college in 1986, I went to a university up in the Western North Carolina mountains in, at least at that time, a small town who had only recently gone from a dry county to one that you could actually buy beer in. The brand new License to Ill album by the Beastie Boys was all the rage and there were only three things to do at ASU . . . party, ski and fuck.

Oh, and academia. Right. Let’s not forget that one although I was more of a participant in the Big Three leaning heavily on the partying which usually led to the other two at some point.

I was a pretty good skier but I’ve never done it sober so that could just be me livin’ a dream.

I’m sure it’s no surprise to hear that I never finished college, something I both regret and understand that I really had no business going out on my own into college at the age of 17. I didn’t even become a legal adult until my freshman year of college and I had already got a DWI (my third day in college, I hadn’t even been to my first class yet – story for another time).

I got off track, sorry. The point was, even into college, things were all done face-to-face. Nobody had the “internet balls” that so many have today.

‘Cause nobody had the internet. If you wanted to talk shit in the 80’s, you’d better have the nuts to back it up or you’d get pounded. If you offended somebody back then, they didn’t cry and claim “triggered” and rally a posse together to fight the injustice and have your words “cancelled” or whatever other new word we have for whiners nowadays.

If you offended somebody back then, they just beat your ass and were done with it.

Do I miss it?

Yes, I kinda do. Not just because I was young and svelte and invincible, but because it was simpler. Things seemed more black and white, alpha and omega . . . yes or no – check here. (That’s another note passing reference, Chris.)

My collection of 80’s and 90’s vinyl adorns my living room wall (might be some 70’s too). I still watch shows that I watched back then, ironically enough, thanks to the advancement of streaming services, like M*A*S*H, Mork and Mindy and some others that escape me at the moment but because I am an (early) Gen Xer, memory is not what it used to be.

If I could remember passwords like I remember 80’s lyrics, I’d be in good shape.

I still wear the exact same sneakers I wore in high school. The same type, not the same pair, let’s not be ridiculous. My family still gives me a lot of grief for the sneakers but it’s worth it for the pillows that my feet rest upon.

I still have a bottle of Drakkar Noir. Your milkshake might have brought all the boys to the yard, but break that shit out and the girls came a-runnin’. Deny it all you want, ladies, you know I’m right.

I love to play “do you remember” with my friends from back then and it makes me wish we knew then what we know now about how good it was then.

It irritates the fuck outta me to hear shitty instrumental versions of my beloved 80’s music in the grocery store.

I’m still in contact with my girlfriend from back then, we are great friends and for those of you that don’t have that advantage, it means more than you could ever imagine. Yeah, we talk about our (grown adult) kids and whatever is ailing me as of late, but having that connection to those good times is enough.

There are other things that carry through to now that I still do because they were so ingrained that it’s hard to let go. I wish smoking was one of those things I could let go of but we’ll just say things are moving in the right direction as far as that goes. I started because a girl I liked when I was a sophomore in high school smoked and I needed an excuse to hang out on the smoking flats (that is a designated area in our high school that we were allowed to smoke, Chris) with her. Except for a couple of months of attempting to quit and Marine Corps boot camp, I’ve smoked ever since.

Other things that are less detrimental to my health that have carried forward . . . I will always, and I mean always because I am physically incapable of not doing it, double space after every sentence. We were taught that in typing class on the old IBM Selectric typewriters and it is now such a natural thing to do that it can’t be stopped. (There are a couple of you here that may remember Mrs Vuncannon.) I double space in text messages. I’ve even turned off the option that automatically puts a period to end the sentence when you double click the space bar because that fucks up my typing stride. I’ve actually disabled anything helpful on my phone, spell check, predictive text, automatic capitalization, all that shit, off, off and off. (See previous “I’ll do it myself” statement.)

Also, ellipses . . . for some reason, Gen Xers love ellipses.

I do fit a lot of the Gen X stereotypes. I am very cynical and independent. Independent as in, I’d rather just do things myself because my cynicism believes nobody else will do it correctly (See also my OCD traits). I prefer a T-shirt and jeans and maybe toss in a flannel shirt when the weather is cooler. I feel like the idea of a “power suit” is utterly absurd. I own a single suit that I last wore to a funeral 8 or 9 years ago and the only reason I know it will still fit is that I’ve been between 195 and 205 pounds for the last 20 years. If there is ever a need for me to put it on again, you can be assured that it will be kicking and screaming.

I’m also very DIY. I can fix just about anything and if I’m not sure if I can or not, I’m not afraid to tear it apart and at least give it a shot. Sometimes I actually get it fixed (I have a 65″ TV that is still working 4 years later that I fixed after a lightening strike) and other times it gets put back together and filed under “Yep, that’s broke”. I taught myself to be a mechanic by tearing my own car apart to see what was what and apparently it worked since the Marine Corps decided they wanted me to be a helicopter mechanic. This is, by no means, thanks to my father whose idea of teaching was “hold this light” or the more popular “will you shine that goddamn thing over here?!” I learned by trial and error, successes and failures, until the successes outnumbered the failures and carried over into other things like household repairs, appliance repairs and apparently now, flat screen TV repairs.

I’m not intimidated by new technology because I’m willing to learn anything. I taught myself to build a website by doing my own research and studying and actually DOING it back in the late 2000’s when it was still a big deal to accomplish and I did it to, what was at the time, a great deal of success that at one point had reached over a million visitors (Chris being one of them). So for all you Millennials and Gen Zers that want to accuse us Xers of not knowing anything about “your” technology, think again, we know all about it and how you use it. The difference is that we have a skill that you don’t . . . we know how to live without it.

Yes, I realize I’m saying that while sitting in front of my dual monitors with King of Queens reruns playing on the left monitor while I type on the right one, Alexa staring blankly at me with the time showing waiting for me to call her into action at my smallest whim, and my iPhone sitting neatly beside my colorful wireless keyboard. I didn’t say we DO live without it, I just said that we know how.

I can drive a manual transmission. In fact, I prefer it. My first car was a manual transmission. Unfortunately, that is a very, very rare option nowadays.

We also seem to end a lot of sentences with “nowadays”.

“These fuckin’ kids nowadays *insert Gen X gripe here*” are words that have left my facehole and that alone makes me sad.

The idea of using 80’s song titles as the titles for all my blog posts is apparently not all mine, I recently found out. I watched a series on Netflix called “Loudermilk” that came out in 2017 that used 80’s song titles as the titles for all of their episodes. Three seasons worth. I started doing it before I had watched the show or even knew it existed, so I’m still claiming it as my idea. I do highly recommend the show, however. I described it to Leo as “imagine if I were to be in charge of a regular AA group”. He immediately understood.

Many who have been asked if they could go back to their youth, “what would they change”, say they wouldn’t change a thing. I’m not one of those people. I’d say that I wouldn’t change much. High school, my friends, the bullshit we used to get into when we were out “not being stuck in the house”, the romances, the music all of that I would absolutely leave the same. The number of things I would change are only a few. I would have never started smoking, because as it turns out, we were allowed to hang out on the smoking flats and not smoke. I would have never started drinking (assuming I am allowed to know then what I know now and that’s a blog post for another day). I would have focused on college and do as well as I know that I could have. I am by no means an idiot, I just don’t have the paperwork that is apparently required to prove it. (A bachelors degree for entry level jobs making only a hair more than minimum wage seems to be the norm rather than the exception.)

More than anything, I wish I had stood up for myself to my father. I think if I had, my life would have worked out very different. Not that I haven’t made my own mistakes for which I only have myself to blame, there are a shit-ton of those, but I think had I done that one thing, maybe I would not have made some of those mistakes.

I don’t know. That’s for me, my psychiatrist, psychologist and a handful of pills to figure out.

But, in the end, if I could go back there, would I?

Oh hell yeah. In a heartbeat.

Even if BB’s do sting like a sonofabitch.

The Breakfast Club will always be my favorite movie.

Phoebe Cates will always be my first crush.

I love all ya’ll. I’m still workin’ on me.

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