When I Was A Kid

This post was pub­lished over 700 days ago and there­fore may not rep­res­ent cur­rent Out­side Con­text think­ing or opin­ion. Please, do not let that detract from your enjoy­ment of it!

When I Was A Kid
by Ern­est Cline

When I was a kid adults used to bore me to tears
with their tedi­ous diatribes about how hard things used to be when they were grow­ing up, what with walk­ing twenty-five miles each way to school every morn­ing, uphill, both ways, through year-round bliz­zards, car­ry­ing their younger sib­lings on their back
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’ve reached the ripe old age of 29…
I can’t help but look around and notice
that the youth of today –
You’ve got it so fuck­ing easy!
I mean, com­pared to my child­hood,
you live in a god­damn 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 god­damn lib­rary and look it up!
And there was no e-mail!
You had to actu­ally WRITE some­body a let­ter,
with a PEN,
and then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the fuck­ing mail­box. And it would take, like, a WEEK to get there.

And there were no MP3s or Nap­ster!
If you wanted to steal music
you had to go down to the record store and shoplift it your­self!
Or you had to wait around all day and tape it off of the radio, and then the DJ would usu­ally talk over the begin­ning and fuck it all up!

You wanna hear about hardship?

You couldn’t just DOWNLOAD porn.
You had to bribe some home­less dude
to buy you a copy of Hust­ler from the 7–11.
It was either that or jack off to the lingerie sec­tion of the JC Penny cata­log.
Those were your options!

And there was no call wait­ing! If you were on the phone and someone else called -
they got a BUSY SIGNAL!

And we didn’t have Caller ID either!
When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was!
It could be your boss, a collection’s agent, your mom, your drug dealer –
You didn’t know!
You had to just pick it up and take your chances, mister!

And 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 just a 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 and until you died.
Just like LIFE!
Those video games built char­ac­ter, Sonny Jim!

And when you went to the movie theater –
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 fucked!

And sure, we had cable tele­vi­sion, but back then that was only, like, 20 chan­nels!
And there was no on-screen menu!
You had to use a little book called the TV Guide to find out what was on!

And there was no Car­toon Net­work!
You could only get car­toons on Sat­urday morning!

Do you see what the fuck I’m say­ing?!!
We had to wait all week, you spoiled little bastards!

That’s exactly what I’m talk­ing about.
The prob­lem with you kids today is that you’ve got it too damn easy!
You’re spoiled!

I swear to god, you wouldn’t last five minutes … back in 1987.

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