Wednesday, January 6, 2010

When I Was Your Age...

When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious monologues about how hard things were when they were growing up – what with walking 25 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 jobs after school at the local mill where they worked for 35 cents an hour just to help keep the 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 hooey 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 forty-five, 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 friggin' 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 – we wanted to know something, we had to go to the fraggin' library and look it up ourselves! And there was no email, no text messaging! We had to actually write somebody a letter – with a pen! – and then you had to walk all the way to the nearest mailbox and mail the thing, and it would take like a week to get there!

There were no MP3s, no downloadables. You wanted to steal music, you had to go to the motherin' record store and shoplift it yourself! Or we had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio, and the DJ would usually talk over the beginning and screw it all up!

You want to hear 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! Those were your options!

We didn’t have any fancy crap like Call Waiting! We didn’t even have cell phones! If you were on the phone and someone else called, they got a busy signal and had to try again later! And we didn’t have Caller ID either! When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was! It could be your mom, your boss, a collections agent…you didn’t know! You just had to pick it up and take your chances, mister!

Playstation? Xbox? Wii? Hah! We had the Atari 2600, with games like “Space Invaders” and “Asteroids,” and the graphics sucked ass! Your guy was just a little square! You 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 faster until you died! Just like REAL LIFE!

When you went to the movies, there was 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!

Okay, sure, we had cable television. Barely. There were maybe 20 channels, and there was no onscreen menu! You had to get a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on! And 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 bastids!

That’s exactly what I’m talking about! You kids today have got it WAY too easy! You’re spoiled, soft, I swear ta God! You kids wouldn’t have lasted five minutes back in 1978!

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