I find it funny how my mom, uncles, and seemingly everyone from their generation constantly get surprised that I am aware of movies, music, and references from the influential years of their youth. Keep in mind, I'm forty-one years old, meaning that I experienced a world before cable television and was damn near twenty-one around the time that the internet started to be more commonplace amongst the general public.

Yeah, I did have one friend in junior high whose father had a computer with a modem but my only experience with that was the one day we spent over an hour waiting for a picture of a naked lady to load one line at a time. Other than that, the only computers that I had ever seen were the ones in my school's computer lab as well as the one owned by my grandmother's pervy boyfriend where from time to time he'd forget to hide the disks to one of the pervy games that was similar to Leisure Suit Larry.

Yeah, I had more access to various forms of entertainment than my parent's generation but it was nowhere even close to the access to everything that the kids have increasingly been getting over the past couple decades. I just find it weird how the older generation treat my peers as if we lived with the technological advances of people half my age.

"You know who Joan Baez is," my uncle asked in pure shock that I understood his reference. Granted, he doesn't have any kids of his own so I can see why he may struggle to gauge what my peers are aware of or typical ways we came across new content as kids but he should be aware of what was around because he was alive during the same decades. That, and my mom, who by definition has at least one kid my age, is also often surprised that I'm even aware of popular bands from her day.

It's as if they forget, as far as music goes, all we had in the '80s was either the radio or a small collection of cassette tapes which was only small because we were kids and couldn't afford to buy more. If we got bored with our options, we didn't have the internet to turn to so we had to resort to our parent's old records.

The same goes for movies and TV. Yes, cable started to become common when I was in elementary school and VCRs became affordable around the time I hit junior high but even though we had these additional delivery devices, it took damn near decades for the production of new content to catch up to the potential of these new outlets. This meant that the twenty new cable channels and flood of VHS cassettes was filled with archived programming going back to my grandparent's time.

To top it all off, we were a generation of abandoned latchkey kids with nothing but time alone to fill so we explored any entertainment option that was available to us. Yes, these new generations are just as desperate for entertaining content but with time came access to where these kids options are 100% customized. This means that anyone born in the age of the internet who is interested in anything that could be considered classic had to actively seek it out since it's hard enough to keep up with the new let alone revisit the old.

That's not to say that I'm better or worse off than either the older or newer generation, I'm just sharing this because I really find it funny how people from either seem to have such a hard time grasping how people from my transitional generation can be fully aware of entertainment references from both worlds.

Oh well, as I said, I found this recent conversation to be funny so I just thought I'd share the thoughts that it inspired and now that it's out of my system, it's time to move on to my next piece of work. As always, I'll check in tomorrow with another update. 

Talk to you then,

The Wicker Breaker