For the Kids

I was wondering when somebody in the NFL might take a stand for the right. In fact, I was surprised that somebody came out in favor of gay marriage. Most athletes have religion crammed down their throats by their coaches and peers.

Even though Matt Birk has attempted to offer his point of view in an eloquent and non-combative manner, his position is selfish, arrogant  and generally repugnant. Moreover, it is cowardly. How dare you hide your bigotry behind children?

Louis C.K. addressed this point brilliantly in one of his monologues. Basically his position is 'Who gives a fuck?"

Seriously, Matt Birk, your kids are your problem. As a parent it is your job to explain things to them. If you're not comfortable explaining why two guys are getting married, that's indicative of a deficiency with you, not society.

I don't know what it is about gay marriage that frightens you, and I really don't care. Perhaps you're worried that it will encourage your kids to be gay. I hate to break it to you, it doesn't work that way. It never has. Our society has been absolutely cruel to homosexuals but they keep popping up and since I'm personally acquainted with a few, and actually knew some of them as kids, I can personally attest to the fact that it was not a choice. One classmate grew up in a family with a lot of machismo to go around. His brothers were jocks, but he was always a bit girly. That's not always the case with homosexuality  but when it manifests in such an obvious way, it's pretty hard to buy into the "choice" theory.

I'll tell you what is a choice, though, big guy:it's called parental oppression. If one of your kids happens to be gay and you take this intolerant tack at home, that kid is going to be screwed up. Because you're a bigot, you'll blame society's tolerance of "the gay lifestyle" but it will be 100% on you.

We often associate certain psychological problems and self destructive behavioral patterns with homosexuality, but those issues have nothing to do with sexuality, it's the abuse from friends and family that causes that. Can you imagine what it must be like, Matt? Stop and try to think about what it would be like if your father was vehemently opposed to your own sexual orientation. Generally people like you can't fathom what it's like to be gay, but imagine if you had to pretend you were all your life just to please him. 

It would suck. You'd be neurotic.

In fact, that's why so many of us are supporting gay rights, and it's not just marriage equality. We want people to feel secure knowing that they won't be fired, or have their homes vandalized if they choose not to hide their sexual orientation.

I get so tired of people saying that marriage is sacred when the only thing they seem to think threatens marriage is homosexuality. Have you stopped to consider just about every marriage in Hollywood? Hell, Matt Birk, you're in the NFL. A lot of your teammates cheat on their wives every chance they get, isn't that more of a threat to your sense of marital values?

Seriously, I think that it's a lot harder to explain to your kids why Bret Favre texted a picture of his penis to some intern than it is to explain why two dudes are holding hands. Let's try:

Little Birkling: "Daddy, what's a sext?"

Big Dumb Birk: "Where did you hear that?"

Birkling: "I heard that Bret Favre was sexting?"

Birk: "You're too young to talk about it."

Birkling: "So if I like a girl I should show her my peepee?"

 

Birk: "No. Never do that."

Birkling: "But you showed mommy yours."

Birk: "That's different."

Birkling: "She swallows right?"

Birk: "Stop it."

Birkling: "I like Miss Crabopple. She's my art teacher. I'm going to paint her a picture of my peepee."

Birk: "DO NOT DO THAT."

Birkling: "Daddy?"

Birk: "What?"

Birkling: "Were you on that whore boat with Dante Culpepper?"


Look at how that conversation spirals out of control. Bret Favre ruined your child's life. He's going to have an affair with a 38 year old art teacher because Bret couldn't keep his penis off of the information super highway, and your son heard the story when he was watching ESPN for highlight of you. Now let's try gay marriage:

 

Birkling: "Ewwwww. Daddy those to guys are kissing."

Birk: "They just got married."

Birkling: "But it's two boys, daddy. Boys don't do that."

Birk: "Some boys do. Some boys like other boys."

Birkling: "I like boys, but I don't want to kiss one."

Birk: " That's fine. I like boys too, but I like to kiss girls."

Birkling: "You kiss mommy."

Birk: "Yep. I married your mom"

Birkling: "Did you ever kiss a boy?"

Birk: "No. Not like that."

Birkling: "So some boys have girlfriends, but some boys have boyfriends?"

Birk: "Exactly, and some girls have girlfriends."

Birkling: "Oh."
Yeah, I can see how that is detrimental to a child's development. If we allow gay marriage, it might instill a sense of tolerance  Then your kid might grow up to have a gay friend, because he won't feel inclined to beat up somebody over something he doesn't understand. And--holy shit!--your kid might grow up without feeling the need to suppress his own sexual identity.

Birkling (at 17): "Dad, remember that time we talked about the married guys?"

Birk: "Yeah?"

Birkling: "Well, I'm gay. I had a feeling I was even way back then but my friends at school always made fun of homosexuality so I didn't want say anything, but I remembered our talk and I figured I could tell you."

Birk: "Son, I love you no matter what."

It's kind of sappy, but it's a hell of a lot better than the alternative:

 

Cop: "I'm sorry Mr. Birk. It appears your son committed suicide. He left this note."

In too many cases, it really does go that way.

Ultimately, the kids have nothing to do with it. This is just a smoke screen. There is no evidence out there which proves that same sex marriages provide a more stable environment in which to raise children. Perhaps you've heard of something called a "dysfunctional family"? Yeah, straight couples have pretty much fucked the institutions of marriage and parenting six ways from Sunday, so it's unlikely that homosexuals will make things worse.

Get over yourself, asshole. This isn't about you or the tiny little vacuum you want to raise your kids in. If you're not man enough to handle the real world, get neutered.

http://www.foxsportsnorth.com/10/02/12/Birk-Kluwe-matching-their-considerable-w/msn_landingalt.html?blockID=798783&feedID=5930

To Mitt:

Dear Mr. Romney,

I saw what you said about 47% of the country and I wanted to respond.

Well, Mittens, I'm not dependent on the Government. I mean, I wouldn't mind if somebody threw me a little subsidy every once in a while, but I've been holding down a regular gig for quite a while. No Welfare. No Food Stamps. No Earned Income Credit. Just me and my taxes. The pittance of unemployment I collected about 10 years ago has been paid back in spades, and I'm pretty sure I'd paid most of it forward in the first place. Hell, if Bush hadn't skull-fucked the economy I probably wouldn't have been out of work in the first place, but that's another story about another pampered trust-fund pansy who never earned a mother fucking thing on his own.

I'm voting for Obama because, well, fuck you, that's why. How's that? I'm tired of silver-spoon cocksuckers like you milking your trust fund and your daddy's connections for a monumental advantage in life so you can turn around and act like you actually made something of yourself. You dirty, rat-faced scoundrel! You've got hundreds of millions of dollars squirreled away in off shore accounts. You cheated on your taxes for more than a decade and then wiped it all away when you were offered tax amnesty. Meanwhile, I'm still trying to cover some withholding clusterfuck a previous employer bestowed upon me when they didn't send the IRS taxes they skimmed off my bonus check. I'm on the hook for a couple hundred, but you get to make millions vanish. Fuck you. Fuck your hatchet-faced wife who wouldn't know hard times if they kicked her in the vulva. Fuck your moderately inbred, good-for-nothing brats too. And fuck your dressage horses.

Fuck the 13% you pay in taxes.

Is my language to harsh for your cult-ass Mormon sensibilities? Well, fuck them, too.

Fuck you for being a typical rich dick, but fuck you most of all for casting aspersions on me and, oh, the 100 million other people like me. Or is it 150 million? It's a lot of us, whatever it is. 47%?

You're going to sit there in that house your great grand daddy built for you and look down on people like me? Let me tell you something, Mitt: YOU DIDN'T BUILD THAT. Yeah, like I said, fuck you, asshole.

Let me tell you something else, Mitt, that kind of talk is the kind of talk people like you reserve for the private conference room of the most uppity country clubs because if you popped off like that to a regular person you'd end up having to file a court order to get your teeth removed from somebody's fist.

Oh, and Fuck anybody who has the lousy sense of judgment to vote for you, too.

Regards, Steve

100 years?

Two of the oldest people in the world died this week and it made me think of my grandmothers. Fortunately for me, neither one of them made it to 114. I shudder to think what that would be like.

The average life expectancy here in the US is 75. At one point that age seemed to be rising but thanks to obesity-related illnesses I think that might trend back down to a much more manageable 65. We can only hope.

Look, grandparents are great. Generally they spoil you rotten, give you treats you aren’t supposed to have and they serve as a buffer when your parents feel the need to whip you with honing straps or burn you with cheap cigars.

When you’re a little kid they try to tell you what is was like growing up in a concentration camp, but you can usually get them to shut up and read you the latest Encyclopedia Brown installment.

As you get older, they really start to lay in with the guilt but as a teen you’re pretty good at tuning people out so it’s no big deal. It’s just background noise. One thing you don’t tune out is their sorry excuse for not slipping a twenty in your birthday card: “I’m on a fixed income,” they whine.

Yeah, well I’m on a ‘no income’, toots. You know that asshole Reagan you voted for because he “looked like a president?” Well, his voodoo economics put the kibosh on 350 jobs at the Ford plant and now I can’t get a minimum wage job at the Dairy Queen because there are a bunch of 50 year-old men lined up for every shift they can get—but I digress.

Christmas is even worse. My one of my grandmothers would steal toys out of her neighbors’ yards and give them to us. When I was 16 I got a Fisher Price Big Wheel with a broken pedal for Christmas because I was the oldest and it was the biggest present. My brother got a silver ‘frisbee’ that was actually a hub cap from a 1976 Pontiac Bonneville. We were playing with it that Spring and it sliced off one of his fingers on the way to a date with his temporal lobe. To this day he’s psychotic, flying off into weird tantrums where he screams about grievances past and present. About four years ago he came at me with a knife because I poked holes in his ‘Stretch Armstrong’ doll—in 1978! Now he’ll be angry again because I called it a doll.

I held out hope that my grandparents would redeem themselves at my graduation, but they stayed true to the “fixed” income excuse. One grandmother decided bringing a jello mold (with diced veggies suspended inside) to my party was a sufficient gift while the other gave me a hook rug that resembled a diploma. She said it would be something I’d cherish for years to come. Along with the 35 other hook rugs she gifted to me over the years, I suppose.

Then you’re in your 20s and your grandparents are of no use to you at all. They’re bitter. They take every opportunity to make you feel guilty about being young and having an ass that would hold up an adult diaper. You visit with them because you have to, but no matter how much you visit they don’t feel like its enough. This is because in spite of all their speeches about family, love and respect, your parents go out of their way to avoid them. They saddle you with it. “Go visit your grandma,” they say. “She won’t be around forever, after all.”

You can almost hear the hopefulness in their voices when they say that. You hope that it’s soon because when you’re back at home for the Holidays your primary objective is hooking up with all the old high school sluts. Quality time with grandma just cramps your style.

If your grandparents follow the rules, they punch out before you turn 30 and if you’re really lucky all that ‘fixed income’ garbage was just a ruse and you find 30 grand stuffed an old throw pillow that smells like urine, Pall Malls and Ben Gay. If not, maybe you can crash at grandma’s house and cash her Social Security checks for a while. Unless your junky uncle beats you to it. Even so, you’re off the hook. Once the grandparents are gone you just have to put up with your parents and in due time you’ll be able to stick them in a nursing home and charge your own kids with the responsibility of visiting them. It’s the cycle of life.

But not for these triple digit biddies. They just keep hanging around, bleeding Medicare and Social Security dry by living 40 years longer than their benefits were calculated for and demanding your attention. With a little luck, they’ll get dementia and then at least the stories will be interesting. My grandfather once regaled me with a story about how he got into a fist fight with Gerald Ford over the last smoked turkey leg at the Stark County Volunteer Fire Department Banquet. Then he told me to never trust a woman who waxed her beaver, and then he fell asleep. That proved to be the only useful advice he ever gave me. Although he did teach me ‘the shocker…two in the pink, Poppa, two in the pink indeed.

Still, dementia is tricky. Early on it’s amusing but later it gets surreal and disturbing. When your grandmother starts speaking Hindi while she pulls Matchbox cars out of her hooha, it’s just not fun anymore. And that’s what you get when the human odometer rolls over.

Abort, Abort, Abort

There's a lot being made of Tim Tebow's Super Bowl commercial for Focus on the Family. Apparently Tim's spot is going to feature a pro life message and that has a lot of pro choice advocates upset. They're not as upset by the commercial as they are Focus on the Family's tactics. Focus on the Family often characterizes people who are pro choice as being pro abortion. This is simply true.

I'm pro abortion. I side with the pro choice crowd but it is my belief that most women should get abortions. Let me explain:

If a woman is pregnant there's a pretty good chance she's hot and if she's not hot then she's probably “do-able” under the right circumstances. Even if she's only marginally attractive, the fact that she's pregnant proves that she's promiscuous and promiscuity increases the hotness factor. Guys don't run around impregnating ugly women and women who don't put out aren't likely to get pregnant.

I know, I sound like a pig. That's fine. I accept that. A lot of people can't deal with honesty.

There are cases where I don't approve of abortion. I couldn't care less if married women choose life, unless they're predisposed to cheating on their husbands. I also think that ugly women should not opt for abortions simply because the odds of them getting pregnant again are slim. There's also a distinct possibility that they'll give birth to a girl who will become hot and since this future hottie had an ugly mom she will have low self esteem and be much more likely to turn to sex for validation.

Now I know what you're thinking: Steve, a lot of those pregnant woman might have hot daughters as well. Maybe, but that doesn't do me a whole lot of good. At least not for 15 or 16 years (depending on age of consent restrictions) and even then, I'll be old. That means I'll need more young hot chicks with severe self esteem issues.

No. I need as many promiscuous hot women running around right now. That means abortions. Lots of them. If I were rich I would start up a fund to pay for abortions. My random sex window is closing. I'm rapidly approaching an age where the women I can hook up with don't need abortions because their ovaries have shriveled into bitter old capers.

Unlike some people, I don't find pregnant women particularly attractive. You can keep your “glow” and the increase in breast size stops being a plus once that baby bump emerges. I also don't find women with young children all that attractive and even if I did, they usually aren't very interested in sex. It's natural. This is why male lions and tigers and bears strive to kill cubs in the wild.

I'm hoping that Tim Tebow's spot is so much of a downer that people run out to get abortions just to spite him. I've never really liked Tebow. I don't like anybody who proselytizes and I think that most people get tired of hearing bibles being thumped. I hope Tebow's commercial is sandwiched between a smolderng GoDaddy.com spot and a beer commercial featuring a bunch of models who saved their careers by getting timely abortions. Then, when we go back to the game I hope they open with a shot of the action on South Beach, which will likely be teeming with hot girls, horny guys and the sort of offensive debauchery that makes the stiffs at Focus on the Family write angry sermons.

A Hairy Proposition

"You'll never catch me, Dudley! Mwuhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhaahahaha!"



I often forget that Mike Coleman is a black man. Normally that would be a good thing. We need to live in a society where color doesn’t matter but in Mike Coleman’s case I don’t think about his ethnicity because of his mustache.

Some people think he looks like Lando Calrissian but I wouldn’t go that far. Lando was cool because he was played by one of the coolest men to ever walk the earth. A lot of guys can’t pull off the mustache without looking like they're trying to overcompensate. Billy Dee did. A lot of black men wear mustaches because Billy Dee Williams rocked it so well. If you’re trying to make the BDW connection with regard to Coleman’s creepy ‘stache you have to concede that he maybe looks like Williams’ gay second cousin from East Lansing. Coleman isn’t cool.

To me, Mike Coleman looks more like a villain from one of those silent movies. Every time I see this guy I wonder which railroad tracks he tied the girl to. Maybe that’s why I don’t ever think of Coleman as a black man…I see him in grainy black and white and when he talks I only her the clacking of an old projector barely drowned out by sinister music being played on a phonograph at the front of the theater. I’ve read that Coleman wants to raise our taxes and I think his mustache is a big reason I don’t want to give it to him.




Another mustache I’m really uncomfortable with is the one Brandon Flowers adorns himself with. The Killers’ front man looks like he’s trying to channel Freddie Mercury when he prances around with his 70s-ish arrangement. It doesn’t work.



I like Brandon fine. I enjoy a lot of The Killers’ music. I think they’ve gone a little too mainstream recently but I don’t begrudge them that. If they want to make some money, more power to them. Far better to sell out early than to do it after your hipster fan base has grown old, fat and encumbered by children. I think it’s pathetic to see some of these “alternative” acts bellying up to the retro trough. Sell out when you matter, load up the bank and then reinvent yourself. That's the way you do it. Do you hear me Smashing Pumpkins?




Still, Flowers is not Freddie Mercury. Nobody is. Freddie’s mustache looked terribly out of place as well but he’s the guy who stole ugly mustaches from porn stars and over-the-road truckers and gave them to gay men. Just because Burt Reynolds and Tom Selleck didn’t have the good sense to give in and let them have it doesn’t mean other straight men should try to steal the look back.





Facial hair is a tricky maneuver that not everybody should be trying. Goatees and mustaches are especially difficult to negotiate because they require regular maintenance that is even more demanding than shaving. They’re easy to misalign. Too often people hold their faces differently when trimming their facial hair, failing to account for the natural position of their heads and the relaxed expression they normally carry. The result is fucked up.



Besides the logistical problems is the fact that too many mustaches and goatees are ironic. A lot of guys try to rock a little facial hair because they want to look manly but they only end up looking queer. There’s no such thing as gaydar but when a guy puts a little too much effort into his facial hair it’s a pretty good indicator that he likes penis other than his own.




The problem is that you can’t not put effort into a mustache or a goatee. If you get lazy you look like a trailer park leasing agent or a dump truck driver. You have to understand the balance between caring about your hair but not looking like you do. That’s where the manliness line is. Most people aren’t macho enough to pull off a mustache or a goatee.




Beards are much easier but you have to customize your beard to your personality. Don’t rock the full biker beard and commute on a Trek. You can’t grow one of those counter-culture Rastafarian beards and hold down a job at a Fortune 500 company. Your beard has to be who you are and it has to work on your face. If you have four chins you might want to forgo the tightly-trimmed jaw line tracer and if your facial hair grows as though you’re in the middle of a round of chemo, it might be best to stick with the baby face.



People are going to judge you by the way you wear your facial hair. There’s nothing wrong with that. Facial hair is a personal choice. If you choose to look like a gay man heading for a cabaret, don’t be surprised when some bear slips you a roofie and you wake up aching on both ends and if you want to raise my taxes, try shaving off that pencil-thin huckster ‘stache.

The truth about Mom and Dad

People often ask me, SteveVC, why do you hate your parents so much? The answer is that I don’t hate them at all. I absolutely adore them. Now that they’re in prison and can no longer torture and kill innocent pets and wayward hobos I’ve really come to respect and admire them.

My mom, whose real name is Eunice Blatz, has lived a hard life. She was cut out of the Blatz family fortune when her father married Tonya Harding and left the balance of the estate to her. It’s not as glamorous as it sounds. Tonya inherited a 1975 Ford LTD with one headlight and a doublewide trailer in Muskegon Michigan, several rows up from the lake. Still, it was hard on my mom.

She worked in the fetish porn industry for a while before taking to the road with several other women who could queef on demand. They were called the Pussy-fart Dolls and they were big hits, touring the truckstop circuit of the southwest through the late 50s and early 60s, before they set up shop in a seedy little Hollywood Blvd dive that was later purchased by Johnny Depp and renamed The Viper Room. Rumor has it that the burlesque troupe that performed there took their name from an old poster that was in the dressing room. But they changed “fart” to “cat” since none of them were particularly good at queefing, although that changed when Nicole Scherzinger became the front woman.

Pregnant with me, my mom kept performing. My grandmother, who was a bouncer at the club, told me that I was technically miscarried four times, generally being ejected from my mother's uterus during the her show stopping rendition of Foxy Lady. They’d just stuff the fetal version of me back inside and mom would go back to work. I was none the worse for wear, but the doctor was a little disturbed to find cigarette butts, pull tabs and M&Ms in stuck to the placenta.

Growing up, my mom was truly attentive. She slept with one eye open all the time. It was a glass eye. She lost her real eye in a knife fight with a Mexican trucker who accused her of stealing his wallet with her vagina during a show. She always said “Big Eunice 2, wetback trucker1…hahahaha” when she talked about it. I never knew what she meant by that as a kid but I found out not too long ago that those ugly earrings with the lumpy gray pearls were actually his testicles.

Mom ruled the house with a firm hand and a lit cigarette. When I got out of line she’d burn me with that cigarette cackling, “You’ve come a long way baby!” I once made the mistake of correcting her for using the Virginia Slims tagline when her cigarette of choice was a Newport, which she developed a taste for in grade school when she dated a pimp from Detroit named Sugar Finger. Mom made me eat an ashtray full of cigarette butts, soaked me with lighter fluid and flung lit “strike anywhere” matches at me. After she depleted the whole box, the matches snuffing out before they hit me, she sent me up the road for a box of Garcia y Vega cigars and for the next six weeks I was punished with cheap stogies instead of the milder menthol cigarettes. There are still scars on my body that smell like burnt tobacco. Whenever I have to make a moral decision, I sniff one and think of my mom.


My dad was a cross between Al Bundy and Joe Jackson. He was an alternate on the 1960 curling team and desperately wanted his kids to achieve success where he had failed. Every morning we’d wake up at 3:00am and head outside to practice. 365 days a year. I say we because for a while I had a brother but one day he had the flu and couldn’t get out of bed. My dad canceled practice that day, drove us to Vermont and sold him to a maple syrup plantation. For all I know my little brother is still out there gathering buckets full of sap with a vicious Doberman tracking him, waiting for him to deviate from his route. I think of him whenever I have pancakes.

I had other siblings but they were lost along the way. During the winter my parents saved money by playing a game called Donner Party. When they first mentioned it I was excited because all I heard was the word “party”. I quickly learned what the Donner aspect was.

They never turned the heat on and during the day we’d get thrown outside in the snow. We did our best to keep warm but eventually your body just starts to shut down. Mom and dad would watch intently from the window, waiting. Waiting for one of us to succumb to the frigid air. When somebody finally fell to the ground, the victim of hypothermia, the game was over and we all went inside for dinner. A big dinner with all the trimmings and lots of fresh meat. I didn’t want to eat my baby sister, I swear I didn’t, but I was so very hungry and she was delicious.

Seven kids went into that family. One was sent to Vermont, I made it out alive. We ate the rest.

Anyway, Curling. Dad wanted me to be the best curler ever. Every day sliding rocks and sweeping. During the summer we did it in the back yard. Have you ever tried to curl on grass? It’s impossible, but after hundreds of vicious beatings I found a way to make it work. I was great.

The problem is that I had too much power on ice. By the time winter rolled around I was all yoked up for curling on grass and my control was off. I was blasting rocks through arena walls on the amateur circuit. I was sweeping the ice right down to the concrete floor. At the Outdoor Games in Saranac Lake one year, five people drowned when my aggressive sweeping cracked through the ice. It was a disaster. You might have seen it on George Michael's Sports Machine.

The International Curling Association reviewed my performances and insisted I was on steroids. I passed every test but they eventually banned me from competition because I was a danger to other competitors. I was told I could apply for reinstatement after 5 years but didn’t fit into my dad’s plans. He was crushed. I was supposed to bring home the gold. A five year suspension was out of the question.

I was kicked out of the family and forced to make it on my own. I dabbled in hook rugs, migrant working and gay porn before I made my bones in the fast food industry. After a few years out of the game, my curling form is manageable and I hustle fools on the weekends. I still have wicked power which comes in handy when people set up blocking stones. BOOM. Cleared the ice again. I’ve been thinking about going pro if I can get a work visa in Canada. People know me in curling circles. I’m a little old, but I’ve got mad skills.

My parents were arrested for plotting to assassinate Danny DeVito (It’s a long story, don’t ask.) and I reconnected with them at the trial. We vented our frustrations with each other. I bought my mom a few cartons of Newports to make up for all the cigarettes she crushed out on me and my dad is pretty happy that I’m a street curler. They probably won’t get out of prison alive. My dad will out last my mom by becoming somebody’s bitch (after all, that’s how he survived the marriage) but he’s not healthy. He used to freebase bacon and his heart is weak. Mom will get shanked within a year. She’s just not as quick as she used to be. Surly as she ever was, but the reflexes are shot.

Anyway that’s the story, I hope it explains where I’m coming from.

closure

As a Gen-Xer I have come to hate the term “closure”. I understand the importance of resolving things but to me the 90s was the “closure” decade. It’s like everybody my age wanted a cookie. I don’t know why. I blame post-goth, grunge wannabes like Ethan Hawke and Winona Ryder. So much vying for validation while acting like they were too cool to care. A bunch of whimpering pansies we were.

I suppose that’s what happens when your grandparents start browbeating you with tales of how great they were. Surviving the Great Depression, fighting back the scourge of NAZI Germany, and then getting called right back into the Cold War. They were the ultimate patriots and they never let you forget it. Then Tom Brokaw had to come along and jerk them off with his tome, The Greatest Generation. Thanks a lot Tom, I can’t speak for everybody else but my Grandparents wore that shit like a badge. Read this book, boy. Read it and understand. Understand that you owe us. You owe us everything. Now run to the store and get me a big box of Depends.

At least they died before they sucked every bit of the zest for life out of me. They did a hell of a job convincing me that the world was going to end in THE YEAR 2000, which is why I never really felt the need to excel in my studies or worry about holding down a good job, but they kicked the bucket before I blew my brains out like Cobain. That’s why he did it, you know. He was a GOD but when he told his grandmother she laughed in his face and told him he’d never be as good as Mel Torme. His parents were no better. Our generation wrote the book on Rock music, Curt. We don’t know why you’re wasting your time.

Our parents didn’t help matters much. They managed to turn dodging the draft and smoking dope into some sort of revolution. Basically they partied for 10 years but to hear them tell it, they were in the trenches making the world a better place for our undeserving asses. We weren’t worthy and we never would be. Our Grandparents agreed.

So Gen-X grew up feeling like crap and half-believing that we were all going to die in some horrific apocalyptic disaster in THE YEAR 2000. We were worthless and we’d never amount to anything.

As we got older we pierced our faces, shoplifted stuff on Rodeo Drive and started our quest for something called “closure”. By the late 90s it was a fucking buzz word. If Starbucks didn’t give you skim milk you called their customer service line for “closure”. We fought with our parents at our grandparents funerals in hopes of reaching “closure”. If your roomie borrowed your socks you were forced to pout until he gave you “closure”.

Now it’s 2009 and most of Generation X is staring down the barrel of the big FOUR OH. Some of us are already there. We’ve resigned ourselves to the fact that life is going to keep rolling whether we get “closure” or not, so most of us just plug along.

We don’t try to make the younger generations feel bad even though it’s painfully obvious they’re a bunch of spoiled little punks who don’t know what it was like to live in an era before you could watch HULU or listen to MP3s on your phone. Back in our day, you had to listen to music on a portable CD player that would skip every time you moved. One second you’re jamming to If I could turn back time and the next Will Smith was Gettin Jiggy Widit. Phones where as big as shoe boxes, weighed as much as a cinder block and they gave you cancer instantly. All you got in return was a shitty phone call that got dropped before you could get any “closure.”