These are the Good Old Days – Fiction

These are the Good Old Days

by Kerry Joyce
illustration by Mark Reusch

I saw Dole interviewed by Barbara Walters on 20/20 the other night and the addled old bastard still doesn’t know why he wants to be President. Every once in a while he gets all misty-eyed talking about the olden days which is a perfectly acceptable lifestyle if you live in a nursing home, but is definitely “inappropriate behavior,” as we say in the morally neutral ’90s, for someone in the Oval Office. Even my fellow boomers, who should be young enough to know better, act as though their Woodstock Nation was somehow superior to the way things are today.

I was born in 1958, old enough to remember the good old days, and I think you Gen X’ers and Gen Y’ers should quit believing all that stuff about how great it was back then, stop feeling sorry for yourselves, and start enjoying life because things are better, a lot better, now.

I know Boo-Hoo Bob misses his golden age, although that hasn’t kept him from taking up stage diving. But even when something actually was better, like marijuana for example, he gets mixed up, and says it’s much stronger today. In fact, any gray-haired stoner will tell you that for the typical proletarian, the quality definitely hit a peak in the late ’70s, when gold went for forty dollars an ounce.

Hearken back with me back then to the days of tedious yore, when stereos were called “consoles” and were designed more to fit in with the living room decor than for sound quality, when bare breasts never jiggled on the ol’ black box and an ice skater’s spinning buttocks was hot stuff, when people read National Geographic for the hot parts, and when we believed that public officials were actually less depraved than we were ourselves in our secret sordid lives.

Living in an upper middle class suburb, I had access to my share of the ’60s’ and ’70s’ goodies. More so in fact, because we were upper middle class in income only. The Joyce clan was actually a well-funded collection of hellraisers, as you might well guess from the fact that I’m at this moment both writing for Lollipop and pushing forty. But even with the mini-bike, the Post Super Sugar Crisp for breakfast, the black lighted basement and bedroom, and somehwat fewer of the usual bourgeois constraints, my misspent youth was, compared with the opportunities of today, kind of a drag. Consider the following:

A. Pimples. The ’60s and ’70s had trillions of them. I certainly had my share. Clearasil back then was pure snake oil. It was really just this brown shit you smeared on your face that did an absurd job of trying to cover zits up. You had a choice. You could walk around with zits, or with brown shit all over your face. Now pimple cream contains benzoil peroxide, which actually does what the lying fuckers only claimed it did back then.

B. Fat. Twenty years ago, people were told to avoid carbohydrates like bread and pasta, and to eat lots of protein. This is the exact opposite of what diet experts advise today. Now they say fill up on loads of carbohydrates because they are low in fat, which is the real culprit in gaining weight, and avoid protein- rich foods because they usually have lots of fat in them. This actually works. So now more people who want to be beautiful can be. Of course, more people are fatter than ever because of…

C. Shitty Food. Unless your mother was Italian, the food in the ’60s and ’70s sucked, so nobody bothered eating as much. No Japanese, No Thai, No Indian, No Mexican. The Chinese restaurants then were mostly “Polynesian” and featured sweet and sour, breaded, deep fat-fried mystery meat. Everyone loved it though becuase we were all so stupid, we attacked anything that wasn’t meat loaf. Italian food was exotic, unless you were lucky enou

ugh to have the aforementioned mother. The town I lived in until I was ten didn’t even have a pizza place. Now it has three. Grocery stores have about five times more items in them today than they did thirty years ago.

D. War. We still have ’em on a regular basis but the draft is gone and we don’t endure nearly as many casualties. Several tens of thousands of Americans died in Korea and Viet Nam in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. But fewer than a thousand died in the ’80s and to date in the ’90s. This trend should continue for some time due to our new secret weapon: Sleep deprivation.

The idea is, you strike an entrenched enemy with earth-shaking bombs for weeks. That way, nobody can get any shuteye. Everyone had a good laugh when some of Saddam’s elite troops surrendered to a photographer, but how brave would you be if you hadn’t had an hour’s sleep in almost a month?

E. Technology. Rotary telephones, just three TV stations, AM radio. Maybe the music was great back then, but if you were in your car, you’d hear the same ten songs all day long. Not only did they play the same songs, but they played the same songs at the same time, day after day. I remember hearing “Bohemian Rhapsody” on the school bus in the Spring of my senior year, every single morning for weeks, a perfect way to ruin even a song you happen to like. Only “luxury” cars had FM radio, which didn’t really broadcast rock ‘n’ roll until the mid-’70s. ‘BCN in Boston was around earlier but had a weak signal that didn’t reach suburbia very well.

Things were so boring that when it rained out people mostly did only two things: Watch TV and bitch about the commercials. Now people can use the remote to avoid stupid commercials, but since commercials were the real point anyway, television fought back by making the commercials better than the shows.

People today are only about as happy as the C. I. A. makes their minds up to be, some say, which is not very happy at that. But if you can disable the microchips in your dental fillings, like I did, you should find that, overall, all this information technology is a boon. Personal computers and the Internet are actually opening up new worlds of opportunity for education and fun. Desktop publishing allows for ‘zines like Lollipop, and for lazy bastards who would never type or write anything by hand (me for instance)to have a convenient opportunity to express themselves. Bands have access to studios and recording equipment unheard of twenty years ago.

Back in 350 B. C., Diogenes spent every lunch hour prowling the streets of Athens with a lit candle looking for an honest man, without much success. But with a modem and a half- way decent web browser he could probably find one within a couple of weeks.

The bad news is that it was only about as hard to take home two hundred dollars a week twenty years ago as it is today, as a sales clerk, landscaper, or waiter. But at that time in Boston you could get a good one-bedroom for $150 a month, a pack of cigarettes for sixty five cents, a concert ticket for $8, a six pack for a $1.50, and a car that would pass inspection for a hundred. And the price for a ticket out of unskilled and semi-skilled work (college tuition) was a lot more affordable, too. It’s not that young people are any more slack than they ever were, it’s just tougher to be that way and make the rent.

But the ’90s overall are well worth the price of admission. Enjoy.