Whenever my friends and I get bored, we tend to talk about ridiculous things for extremely long periods of time.
For example, last weekend I had a 45-minute conversation with my roommate about the positives and negatives of fist-fighting Regis Philbin.
During a casual round of "which decade," I came to a startling revelation. To play "which decade," each contestant picks a generation in the history of the United States and give reasons why it would be an excellent era to live in.
As always, I began to explain why I wished I was born in 1950, so that I could have been 21 years old in 1971. I described how great it would have been to experience the summer of love, see Ali fight Frasier and watch Nixon resign on live television. But after I had explained my answer to my roommates, I started to think about my own generation and why no one will ever choose it as an answer for "which decade."
When I stop and think about it, I realize that we live in a really weird and messed-up time. Our generation features a president who can barely speak the English language. We have terrorist bombings, an extremely large national deficit and Ryan Seacrest at every turn. We have cell phones and credit cards, and the price of a full tank of gas costs more than a month's rent. Literally every day something happens that makes me wish I had access to a tricked-out DeLorean.
Last week I actually saw Bob Dylan on a television advertisement for Cadillac. The man I once considered to be the coolest hombre on the planet is now peddling DeVilles. Only a generation as sick and twisted as this one could turn the coolest person on the planet into an advertisement whore for the Escalade.
Not only that, last week I read in the paper that Yoko Ono is selling the master recording of John Lennon's "Real Love" to the J.C Penney department stores. Don't get me wrong -Yoko's been doing embarrassing and stupid things to John since the '70s, but this has to be a new low. It's almost as bad as featuring James Dean in a public service announcement about seat belt safety.
Unfortunately, I have no access to a flux capacitor, which means I'm forced to stay here and deal with all the madness going on in our generation. But in the meantime, I'll just keeping playing "which decade" and praying to God that I never see Joe Walsh in an advertisement for Preparation H.
