I remember back in the day, when the Web was new to me, I'd sit for hours and hours, just surfing, fascinated by all that information. Now look at me. A tired old pop star in platform shoes.
Isn't that what happens to us all? We each have our glorious, shining moment in the sun, only tbe cast aside for the next big thing. There's always something better coming along. Sure, you were pretty cool, back in the day, but now, you're old news.
This is where you hear the typical well, not me, friend, monologue, but, frankly, it'll happen to us all. A hundred years from now, no one's gonna remember us, our generation, our way of life.
I come from the ass-end of the ill-fated "Generation X". I remember when Pearl Jam first got famous, when coffee bars and goatees were the thing to do, and when Kurt Cobain painted the wall with his brain.
I remember people mourning the guy's death, saying he'll always be remembered.
I remember walking into school and seeing a group of kids gathered around a student with a guitar, playing Nirvana songs.
I had the MTV unplugged album.
I wore the flannel.
There was something oddly pure about it.
Hell, even Woodstock '94 wasn't all that bad.
I'm part of a generation of cynical kids looking for cultural definition, and I think that's how it's always gonna be.
I grew up with heroes like Luke Skywalker and Optimus Prime.
Every generation in the 20th century had some aspect that brought them together and defined them.
They had 2 World Wars, a Great Depression, and a conflict in Vietnam. For years, I'd thought to myself, what about me? What is it that brings my generation together? We had no war, except maybe Desert Storm, but does that even count? We didn't protest. We didn't have brothers going overseas to fight and
never return, well, not all of us. We only had our teen angst and nothing to distract us from it.
And the same question always arose. What about us? What's our defining moment?
I think that our very lack of a moment is what defined us. We're a bitter generation because life was too good. We didn't know conflict. We spoiled ourselves and blamed our parents.
Now we're a bunch of bitter parents, husbands, and wives. The biggest issue we've had to deal with was the fact that Metallica didn't like having their property given away.
What does this say about humanity?
Here, we have a generation that life's been good to. We had no war, no plague, no swarm of locusts devouring our crops, no dust bowl, no depression. But we view it as a bad thing. It's like we need something bad to happen if we want to be good people.
The whole thing is just screwy.
So, we carve our niche into society as a generation and a culture, and we move along. Our fifteen minutes are up; it's time for the next group.
We had our shining, glorious moment, and we didn't know it was there, all the while hoping something would come along.
Now look at us, tired old pop stars in platform shoes.
