. . . especially if you’re, say, in your early 30s.
Remember all those Beatles retrospectives that were around when you were in high school, especially for the 20th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper? Well look around you. High school kids now look at Devo and the Go Gos now from the same temporal perspective that you looked back on the Beatles and Herman’s Hermits.
Pick up an edition of Playboy on your way home from work today. See that buxom centerfold? She was born in 1983, about the same time you were looking at your first Playboy, ever. You dirty old man, put that down right now.
Remember that lame show that was on in the mid-80s called Thirtysomething? That’s you pal. (Well, OK, you’re not a whiney narcissistic Boomer, and you have that going for you at least.)
That kid giving you your Whopper in Burger King looks back on the Reagan administration about the same way you looked back on the Nixon administration. For him, watching the Challenger explosion at the time–as a two or three year old crawling around on the rug in front of the TV–was akin to your watching the Apollo moon rockets taking off at the time, when you were just at the same stage of development.
You’ve found yourself muttering about “kids today”.
All of the presidents you could remember in high school had served honorably in World War II. All of the presidents high school kids remember today had gotten out of serving in Vietnam one way or another.
Aerosmith’s “comeback” was over ten years ago.
That really fine girl you liked in high school is over 30 now and has two kids.
What Woody Allen did wasn’t so bad, was it, now that you come to think of it again? I mean, cut the guy a little slack, who wouldn’t . . . ahem, never mind.