Letting my mind wander can be a dangerous thing. On the drive home today I was craving some audio nostalgia. I found the Mission: Impossible 2 soundtrack on Spotify. It really brought to light how much games like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and movie soundtracks like this shaped my musical palate. A cover of Have a Cigar by Foo Fighters is currently pounding my eardrums and releasing that sweet, sweet dopamine.
For the longest time, every Christmas I would get a gift coin to Record Town. It was the local music store across the bridge in Old Saybrook. I looked forward to it all year. I can’t recall all the music I bought over the years with that Christmas coin, but a few stand out: All Star by Smash Mouth, Otherside by Red Hot Chili Peppers, and the MI2 soundtrack. Those albums definitely hold a special place in my heart.
Somewhere between those albums and now, the world got heavier. Back then the soundtrack in my headphones felt like an escape hatch. A three-minute break from homework, teenage drama, and whatever version of the apocalypse we thought we were living through at sixteen. The funny thing is, listening to those same songs now doesn’t just bring back the music. It brings back the feeling that the world was at least a little more understandable.
The stroll down memory lane came full circle to the present day. I work with an eclectic range of people. Many of us are the same age, within five to ten years. The dark humor never ends. The world we live in is a dark and twisted place. From the Epstein files having shit in them that would blow the minds of those assigned to the X-Files, to the Nazi hell that is ICE in our country. Just what the actual fuck is this world we live in anymore?
I intended to write more often, but truthfully I haven’t had a voice. The current events section has left me dumbfounded and discombobulated. It’s taken me a bit to even feel like putting fingertips to keyboard. The constant thought of “What the fuck of value could I even have to say?” has been strong. Truthfully, I really don’t have much of value to say about our present nightmare dystopia. When the headlines read like what should be an Onion article, what can one really say?
I do wonder how societal norms raised such a sarcastic and dark-witted bunch of heathens. Not that I think anything is wrong with us per se. But I did have a legit conversation with a coworker today referencing the End of Ze World video. We both agreed that at this point in the timeline we would be okay with a world-ending event. We were also okay with the kangaroos living—until we realized that Epstein would probably somehow still be alive, come out of hiding, and fuck the kangaroos. So it would be best if they died too.
Many of us share the same insight that we never thought we would live this long, so we lived fast and failed at the “die young” part of things. Some of us didn’t fail. Another common thread of connection is that many of us are alive today simply because we didn’t want to scar our friends—and in some cases our families—by walking off the stage of life early. While for me the dark thoughts of yeeting myself off the mortal coil are in the past, I truly wonder how many of us struggled with such thoughts and if it was a larger number than in earlier generations.
Many of us were the last of the kids to leave the house in the morning and roam the earth unsupervised until the streetlights came on. Our parents truly don’t know how many harebrained ideas we tried to carry out or how many times we cheated death. Thankfully, the depths of our stupidity were normal and not captured on film. The digital age grew up with us, and early camera phones thankfully sucked. The few photos I have from my late teens are a rare treasure for me.
Maybe that’s part of it. We were the last generation to grow up mostly analog. Our childhood memories weren’t filtered through screens or curated for strangers on the internet. We did stupid things, reckless things, occasionally brilliant things, and the evidence mostly lived only in stories. If you wanted to embarrass someone, you had to remember it—not upload it.
We watched Celebrity Deathmatch, we witnessed the birth of reality television. Beavis and Butt-Head fed us the mind-numbing stupidity we craved and introduced us to new music. We quoted Anchorman at each other like it was a verse from the Bible. Memes came on the scene and we adapted. Many people from my generation have as many memes as photos on our phones. From stick phones to flip phones to iPhones, all of this technology grew up with us. We had ringback tones and custom ringtones. Now if my phone makes noise, I contemplate ending its existence.
Somewhere along the line the world digitized everything—our music, our friendships, our news, our outrage. But our brains were wired in the before-times. We learned how to process the world through mixtapes, scratched CDs, and late-night conversations that disappeared into the air. Maybe that’s why we cope the way we do now. The world got louder, faster, and a hell of a lot stranger. Meanwhile, a bunch of former feral kids who grew up drinking hose water are still just trying to figure out what the hell happened.
Bishop Brown :(:
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