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 would usually talk over the beginning. 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
book 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 kids! And we didn't have
microwaves, if we wanted to heat something up we had to use the stove or go
build a 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!!
