Phil Elmore
Master of Arts
When I was your age, we didn't have it so good.
We had only thirteen channels of basic cable. I used to have to cross the living room -- uphill, in the snow, both ways -- just to turn the channel or change the volume.
We sat too close to televisions that were about three feet deep while absorbing those thirteen channels, constantly standing and sitting when our fathers used us as human slaves to adjust volume from the other end of the living room. I probably absorbed enough rads that my children will be born with three arms -- and they still won't appreciate what I went through at their ages.
We had a really big, aesthetically unpleasant microwave whose touch-sensitive buttons didn't always work. I had video games, just like you -- video games in which one block pushed another block across a screen so the block on the opposite side could send the middle block back to the first block. This looked nothing like the cover art for the video game box, of course, which was an oil painting of two sweating tennis players with rippling muscles smashing a ball between them. Those were tough times, young man.
Worse, we were still expected to GO OUTSIDE at that age.
My parents spent my entire childhood trying to kill me. They sent me out on my bicycle without any pads or helmet at all. Imagine that -- I rode all over the neighborhood on my orange banana-seat bike, my head exposed to traumatic brain injury, my knees and elbows completely unarmored against the of asphalt and gravel. My contemporaries did the same. I knew one kid who fell off his bike and hit his head. We worried about him a lot and wondered why, oh WHY, society did not do something about the mortal peril in which we found ourselves daily.
We went to the playground and climbed jungle gyms mounted on concrete slabs. The jungle gyms were fifteen hundred feet high and topped with barbed wire. Well, okay, they weren't quite that bad, but they were still high up enough that none of us were surprised at the grim fates awaiting us when Billy Simmons fell off and broke his arm and showed up in second grade wearing a cast that we all autographed with trembling hands.
To tell you the truth, it's a miracle I'm even alive and relatively intact at my age. Listen well, young fellow -- for when you're my age you're going to have to think of something to tell your children about how bad you've got it now.
We had only thirteen channels of basic cable. I used to have to cross the living room -- uphill, in the snow, both ways -- just to turn the channel or change the volume.
We sat too close to televisions that were about three feet deep while absorbing those thirteen channels, constantly standing and sitting when our fathers used us as human slaves to adjust volume from the other end of the living room. I probably absorbed enough rads that my children will be born with three arms -- and they still won't appreciate what I went through at their ages.
We had a really big, aesthetically unpleasant microwave whose touch-sensitive buttons didn't always work. I had video games, just like you -- video games in which one block pushed another block across a screen so the block on the opposite side could send the middle block back to the first block. This looked nothing like the cover art for the video game box, of course, which was an oil painting of two sweating tennis players with rippling muscles smashing a ball between them. Those were tough times, young man.
Worse, we were still expected to GO OUTSIDE at that age.
My parents spent my entire childhood trying to kill me. They sent me out on my bicycle without any pads or helmet at all. Imagine that -- I rode all over the neighborhood on my orange banana-seat bike, my head exposed to traumatic brain injury, my knees and elbows completely unarmored against the of asphalt and gravel. My contemporaries did the same. I knew one kid who fell off his bike and hit his head. We worried about him a lot and wondered why, oh WHY, society did not do something about the mortal peril in which we found ourselves daily.
We went to the playground and climbed jungle gyms mounted on concrete slabs. The jungle gyms were fifteen hundred feet high and topped with barbed wire. Well, okay, they weren't quite that bad, but they were still high up enough that none of us were surprised at the grim fates awaiting us when Billy Simmons fell off and broke his arm and showed up in second grade wearing a cast that we all autographed with trembling hands.
To tell you the truth, it's a miracle I'm even alive and relatively intact at my age. Listen well, young fellow -- for when you're my age you're going to have to think of something to tell your children about how bad you've got it now.
