Nostalgia

I was a really little kid in the early 1970s (insert your decade here), too. I remember those days really, really well. I remember long, sun kissed summer days walking "up town" in my tiny hometown (population 3,000 or so), with my mother and her long train of children ('cause I was third in line, out of six), because my parents only had one car, and my mother didn't even have a driver's license.

I remember the big "Gas Crisis" of the mid 70s! I remember being really ashamed of having a dumb ass peanut farmer in the White House (and I like peanuts), who couldn't even launch a successful rescue attempt to get our hostages out of Iran. And gee, the memory of that, even to this very day, still really stinks.

Heck, I even remember the late 1960s! I was knee high to a grasshopper, but probably my very first really good impression was of Richard Nixon, whom my father would have me mimic for any and all guests who showed up at the house. Yep! There I was, a tiny kid, standing in the kitchen, making "the Peace Sign" with both hands raised in the air, with a big grin, shaking my head back and forth, pretending to have Nixon's trademark jowls, saying, "I am not a crook!"

I remember all the songs that I still love to listen to, too. I remember all the wonderful American toys that were produced then (and I still collect many of them), and all the kitschy, low budget TV shows, 'cause all we had to watch were between three and five channels, and if something half way decent was on, everybody watched that crap. Whether it was actually good or not.

But that's nostalgia. And nostalgia is great, but it's not really real, you know. It's a product of the human mind. It's a romantic notion that things used to be better than they are today. Actually, some things were better back then, but some things just weren't all that good. And you know what? It's the same today! Nowadays, some things are better than they used to be... and some things still just plain stink.

And sorry everybody, but a big part of the reason why nostalgia does and doesn't really have the same effect on me that it seems to have on a lot of people who "linger in the past," is that my mother believed (and for all I know still believes beyond the shadow of a doubt) that "everything was better in the 50s." And she reminded us quite frequently by saying that "all that shit that you kids listen to" was no where near as good as the music of the 50s. As a result, as you can imagine, I listened to a lot of her music and still like it to this day. But was all that music of the 70s and 80s "shit?" I sincerely doubt that.