ok gen z

This is from the year of my Boomer birth (note how I capitalize here -- try it sometime), 1961.  This exemplifies what some might call a "high-functioning culture."

When y'all look up from your TikTok videos long enough to consider how to write a piece of music in 7/4 time -- much less how to dance to a piece of music in 7/4 time -- come get me so I can see what you've come up with. I'll be having a cocktail . . . legally.

Same thing, different particulars

Baton Rouge (La.) State-Times, Sept. 18, 1969

I like to look through old newspapers, which to me is a much cheaper way of revisiting my long-lost youth than combing my remaining hair over the bald spot, buying a flashy convertible and having an affair with a nearsighted woman much younger than myself.

Which brings us to the nearsighted, much-younger woman part.

I remember what a media sensation it was when arch pop-culture weirdo Tiny Tim married Miss Vicki . . . on The Tonight Show.


MISS VICKI, otherwise known as Victoria Budinger (or "the pretty New Jersey teenager"), was 17. Tiny Tim, otherwise known as Herbert Khaury, was 37, but everybody thought he was a decade older. In 1969, "Me Too" was more like "Me Can!"

As I said, it was a media sensation.

At this juncture, your woke-ass, under-50 self might be thinking "WHAT THE FUCK?!"

Exactly.

You see, we westerners -- particularly we Americans -- always have been all about the weird shit. 1969's "Isn't that cute? Kinda weird, but cute" has become 2019's "Lock him up and cut his nuts off! Then sue!"

On the other hand, we fail to bat an eyelid at believing there are something like 73 genders today, that "men" can have babies and that we all must state our preferred pronouns. (Mine is "My Lord and Master / My Lord and Master." If you don't think that's an actual pronoun, you are a hater, and you're making me feel threatened.)

AMID ALL the suckage of middle age and aging, the one benefit is having developed (at least one hopes) a finely tuned bullshit detector and an appreciation for the waves of bat-shit crazy that periodically roll through -- and roil -- what's left of our society. So, if you're just floating through postmodern America right now, and you think everything looks pretty normal to you, boy is your old self gonna be embarrassed by your young self in about 50 years.

Assuming, of course, we survive the absurdity that is President Donald Trump. That right there is a big-ass assumption, so we'll see.

Wigged out

July 28, 1970: This. Just this.

It would be a decade, roughly, before I figured out what a deeply, deeply weird place I came from. It would be another decade or so before it dawned on all of us what deeply strange times in which we Baby Boomers came of age.

Aug. 27, 2019: All the incentive anyone needs to open a saving account (assuming we had any money to save) would be . . . interest on our deposits.

I missed all the big events

July 24, 1970: The Antichrist takes up residence at a Baton Rouge, La., appliance store. And I freakin' missed it.

I had no idea that the malevolent ruler of the world had such a fascination with color TV. He and the 9-year-old me would have had something to talk about.

I bet he could have gotten me an RCA AccuColor set long before 1975, when the Old Man finally relented, succumbing to non-stop bitching by me and my mother and admitting that color television was not, alas, a fad. We did not get an RCA from McLeod's, however.

My father was a Magnavox man.

This breaks my damn heart

1962. It was the blackest of years; it was the most idealistic and hopeful of years.

Jim Crow refused to go quietly in the South. Communism, and the fear of it, haunted everything we were, did and said in America. Between us and the Soviet Union, we almost blew up the world.

But also in 1962, if we made it through October, the world would be a better place by springtime -- we just knew it.

Young Americans brimmed with idealism. Black college kids and white college kids risked their lives for their ideals in a peaceful assault against segregationist brutality in Dixie.

The youth of a country that 17 years before had vanquished Nazi Germany and militarist Japan found inspiration in a young president who challenged them to ask what they could do for their country.

JOHN GLENN orbited the earth three times. Next stop: the moon.

America had set its gaze on the New Frontier, and John Stewart of the The Kingston Trio could write liner notes like these above.

I was 1 year old. Hope was alive and kicking. Even in the South.

2019. A broken-down, 58-year-old music-show and blog guy sits at his iMac, typing. He wonders what the fuck happened.

He reads the hopeful, idealistic and oh-God-how-naive words of the late Mr. Stewart, and he wants to cry. He fears that there are no more tears left. Even more, he's terrified that fear will be put to the test again and again.

"So now, as never before, an age of introspection is reaching every one of us." Now our nation is becoming what we've willed within ourselves -- a heart of darkness.

"The horror! The horror!"

Ignore the Johnsons, reap the whirlwind

I attribute the present state of American culture and politics to, back in 1980, people not listening to the anti-drug message of the Brothers Johnson.

Angel dust was, and is, some bad juju.

Things could have been so, so different today had we listened to some common sense advice and not trusted that dust. But we didn't, and now we must rely on legal weed and lethal opioids to dull the screaming of our brains as they react to the suck surrounding us.

The suck that came because "Don't trust that Dust" was just too flippin' complicated a message for we idiots to embrace 39 years ago . . . when we still might have had a chance in hell.

That is all.

Turning working girls into pretty women is our bidness

Baton Rouge: June 6, 1974.

The decision is made that if you cannot do anything about working girls downtown, you at least can turn them into pretty women.

Either that, or my hometown was the epicenter of unintentionally hilarious advertising during my youth.

How to create middle-age stranglers

May 30, 1966.

Buddhist monks were setting themselves alight as the war in Vietnam intensified apace. Surveyor 1 headed for the first soft lunar landing of an unmanned American spacecraft. The Klan was being the Klan in Denham Springs, La. -- which meant that Denham Springs was just being Denham Springs.

And "A WOWIE ZOWIE ZING-A-LING SWING-A-LING THING" had just hit Baton Rouge. The Teen-Age Rattler apparently was "the new fun sensation sweeping the nation."

The reaction to this, no doubt, from every person old enough in 1966 to have spawned a teenager was "Oh, joy." Note the lack of an exclamation point.

THE TEEN-AGE RATTLER was billed as being some sort of bad-complexioned, ill-tempered, bastard child of a hula hoop and maracas.

The "bad-complexioned, ill-tempered and bastard child" parts of the description are solely mine.

I gotta tell you that, as a 5-year-old kid in Baton Rouge on Memorial Day 1966, I would have loved this shit. My parents, not so much.

BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!

For just a measly extra buck, you could buy a 45 single of the original Teen-Age Rattler song, "as recorded by the sensational Happy Four quartet." As opposed to the sensational Happy Four septet.

Considering that you could go down to the TG&Y dime store and buy a hot-off-the-record-press copy of the Beatles' "Paperback Writer" for something like six bits, I can't see the Happy Four's rattlin' wreck of a hack promotional song as much of a bargain.

THEN AGAIN, this is the 58-year-old me talking and not the 5-year-old me talking. On the other hand, the 5-year-old me had his share of Beatles' records. Until July 1966, that is.

July was the month John Lennon's "we're more popular than Jesus" interview hit the States, and Mama busted up my Beatles records. It was Louisiana; she was far from alone. Apparently, cracking up commie records from Limey purveyors of beatnik music was less inconvenient than actually attending worship services.

Not that I'm still bitter or shit.

BUT BACK to May 1966 and the Teen-Age Rattler.

At the time, the Teen-Age Rattler made no impression on the pre-kindergarten me whatsoever. As a matter of fact, I'd never heard of the things until . . . well . . . today.

My best guess is that the "Rattle in the morning . . . rattle at night . . . rattle anytime . . . it's dynamite!" sensation was a sensation in the same vein Donald Trump is sentient -- hardly.

After all, there DID come to be a Generation X. That could not have happened had the "greatest generation" quite understandably been driven to cut short the rattling lives of their rattling teen offspring.

Now let us speak no more of this. We wouldn't want to give rogue youth social-media "influencers" any ideas.