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I was born more with just over one quarter of a century to go in the last millennium, but all I had to hear about was the things I just missed out on. The Beatles broke up four years before I was born. The Summer of Love was like a year or two before that. And later in the 1970s, I was an oblivious baby dummy focusing too much on developing my speech, motor and cognitive skills while mastering the the art of second-hand smoking to be aware of all the far-out revolutions in music and cinema. Before I was 6, it was 1980 and the Eagles had broken up too.

Ha, but the joke's on all of you because I'm exactly the right age to recognize that 1970s music is all mostly shit (yes, even Zeppelin. I'll fight you). If the best you can do for anthems is redneck horseshit like the Allman Brothers, you have to recognize your bar for judging quality is feeble and light and so warped it probably at some point touches the floor. Remember, I don't judge people's taste in things anymore, so I'm OK with you liking what you like. I also need you to recognize that this social stance doesn't preclude me from observing the objective truth that the Eagles suck.

The point of this is not to clarify for you the ways in which I am a judgey hypocrite* but really, since I'm a base-level positive human who only believes in productive thought, speech and action,** I am celebrating the auspicious timing of my birth. I was raised in the throwaway flash and pop hooks of New Wave and hip hop, the only new American art form since white people fucked up rock and roll. Sure, I had to live through hair-metal in the later 1980s and the nu-metal ear-punishment of the late 1990s/early 2000s, but in between I got Nirvana and The Chronic. I'm not saying it was perfect, I'm saying it was good.

I got to experience the turn of a millennium as an adult and witness and understand the full horror of 9/11 as a young dad. I realize as I type this, it's turning into a creepy eulogy of myself or maybe the worlds stupidest Ted Talk that's going to end up being about how we all misunderstood the Segway or some shit.

No, what I'm getting to is that right now, at my age and demographic, I'm alive at exactly the right time. We elect to bug our own homes in the name of corporate convenience. We carry devices that allow us to be tracked and sorted and categorized and sold. We have a government that is under investigative siege in 17 separate but related ways...

Depressing? Maybe. But what if you're a 44 year old white man whom technology is beginning to pass by? What if you're just one the cusp of entering a world so confounding and alien, the only thing keeping you relevant and abreast was the decision to have children, who can now sherpa you through the razor peaks and goat-trails of Fortnite and Discord.

At some point I know it will become too much for me. At some point I will have to develop an epistemological overlay in order to artificially order it all, probably with myself as the personalized center of everything.

That's right, everyone, I find myself ripening in the Golden Age of the Crusty Old Crank. Everything bewildering either has a conspiracy theory to already add menace and agency to the benign and passionless grind of progressive time or at least exists in an atmosphere rich and dense enough that just about any new strung together necklace of nonsense words can come to mean something.

Sure it helps if you're already racist and anti-Semitic. That's where the real growth potential lies. But you don't even have to be white to participate. Although I don't know, it's looking like the anti-Semitism thing might be non-negotiable...

But I'll reckon with that if it comes up. For now I have a rocking chair, I have an old-fashioned non-streaming television delivery system*** to bring me cable news, I have a kid in a danged liberal college, I have people in power I'm right to hold in both contempt and suspicion. And most intoxicating is that it all comes with the oxycodone of calls to action, the animating mantra no adult man with a job they hate and visibly lessening options can resist: I barely have to try.

At what other point in history has reality outstripped the fucked-up imagination of the panicked mob? How many of the conspiracy theories fall short of what is actually happening? It truly is progress. In odd ways it calms me, but only in the sense that I know I don't understand it but I'm irrationally certain that I've got it all figured out.

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*The old writer's adage "Show, don't tell" I think has more than adequately been covered on this particular point

**The Eagles really are hot garbage, though. Come on. "Hotel California"? How much worse would your life be if you never heard that again your life? ZERO PERCENT, I submit. ZERO.

***Although not for long if fucking Dish can't figure out how to get HBO back. Game of Thrones, bitches. Tick tick tick...