Friday, March 27, 2009

Growing Up In The 90s

It’s hard for you kids to understand just how awesome it was to grow up in the 90s. Life back then was a carefree affair, a cool breeze, a colorful splash of candy-flavored excitement. It was a simpler time, a time of Seinfeld, a time of Spice Girls, a time of budget surpluses, big pants, and blow-jobs that changed the course of civilization. A time when somewhere in Hollywood an actor by the name of Bradford Pitt clicked on the Panasonic in his hotel room and saw a lady shaking her newfangled shaggy haircut and called his agent and said, “Who is that delicacy I see before me, I must have her,” and the agent said, “That is Lady Aniston, Sir Pitt, and I shall set up a meeting.” And meanwhile somewhere in a jumble of flourescent purple tubes and wires a certain Lady Jolie was writhing and frenching Sir Jonny Lee Miller and it was called Hackers and it was mind-blowing and nobody had ever seen anything like this so-called “cybernet” before. And in the school libraries we huddled around the single Apple computer and assigned ourselves screen monikers and gained access to the world’s first chat rooms, where we interfaced with strangers and insulted them and tried to engage in cyber-makeout sessions. It was a decade of cut-out Dilbert cartoons adorning office cubicles, a decade of Digable Planets. It was a decade where you could say that the last decade was the 80s. Yes, the 90s were a heady, a marvelous, a spectacular and satisfying era of mall rats, land lines, and “joggable” disc men. A time when teenagers on television were convincingly portrayed by thirty-five year olds. A time when lady rappers wore condoms on their faces and dressed in enormous primary-colored jam shorts and baggy t-shirts with AIDS awareness slogans in bright pink graffiti. Sad to say, we shall never live to see another time quite like the 1990s, and it fades into the blackness of the past leaving only a set of memories that scroll across my mind, like sitcom credits written in casual-handwriting style font.