How my generation screwed up our kids

We told them they were special and they believed us…

I am part of that generation of parents who lied to their children and told them they could “be anything they wanted to be” because if we pointed out that they were four feet, six inches tall and already weighed in excess of 227 pounds and had the vertical leaping ability of a grand piano which meant they probably weren’t going to be the prima ballerina for the Bolshoi Ballet, who knows what kind of psychic damage the truth might do to them.

On the other hand…

Encouraging your child to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge because maybe they can fly and you wouldn’t want to limit their possibilities might not be the most loving thing a parent can do for their child either.

Turns out, being a parent is hard…who knew, except for every other parent in the History of the World?

Because our parents came from that Greatest Generation who went out and beat Hitler and the Nazis, then came home and never talked about it, while developing ulcers and a drinking problem and never hugged us or told us they loved us because they didn’t want to get too friendly with anybody that might get hit by the next mortar round, my generation overcompensated.

We just kept hugging our kids and telling them they were special and it probably came as quite a shock when they left home and found out the rest of the world did not share their parents’ high opinion of their incredible uniqueness.

So what happened next is pretty much my generation’s fault.

When our kids found out we lied our asses off and they probably weren’t going to be President of the United States or play centerfield for the Yankees or win the Indianapolis 500, they continued to hang on to the idea that they were unique and special and that delusion has had many symptoms.

And we’ll start with…

Foodies

So you like food.

Yeah, that’s really incredibly special because nobody in the History of the World has ever liked food before.

Oh, wait…you like food, but you’re really, really picky about it; a trait shared by 100 percent of all two-year olds, but let’s forget that irritating similarity and assume you’re actually something special and see what we get.

You like to grill the waitress about the ingredients in each dish and whether the reduction of raspberries came from fresh fruit, hand-picked that morning by Guatemalan virgins and the waitress doesn’t know because she’s a twice-divorced mother of two, working a double shift to make enough to pay her light bill and doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the reduction of raspberries, so she has to go back to the kitchen, find the chef and say, “Henri, we’ve got one of those goddamn  foodies on table 6” so then the chef has to come out and answer your questions while he’s thinking, “Maybe you should ask some penetrating questions about spit because there’s going to be some in whatever you order.”

Yeah, now that you explain it, that is pretty special.

(Side note: I’ve worked in a kitchen and you do not want to hand shit to people who are overworked, underpaid and on the verge of quitting their horseshit job anyway. Spitting in your food might be the high point of their day.)

If you’re a “foodie” don’t forget to take a picture of your food so you can post it online and show all your social media “friends” (most of whom you’ve never actually met) how much more fun you’re having than they are and they’ll leave comments like “Yummy!” and “Wish I’d been there!” and “Wait, is that some spit in the reduction of raspberries?”

Craft beers aficionados

Here in Kansas City we’ve got a brewing company called Boulevard Brewing which not all that long ago had a sex scandal, which I figured I ought to mention, but has nothing to do with what I’m about to write.

Boulevard Brewing has a beer hall which is a pretty cool place to hang out as long as a bunch of Nazis don’t stage a “putsch” which I just looked up and means “a quick and dirty overthrow of a government” and now that I know what it means, doesn’t sound all that bad. There have been certain moments during the Trump Presidency when I might have been all for one, plus it sounds like they serve beer and I’m guessing overthrowing the government is thirsty work.

Think about it: if there had been a Capitol beer stand available on January 6th, I’m guessing they would have done land office business even though I’m not entirely sure what “land office business” is and I’ve exhausted my interest in research by looking up “putsch.”  

Anyway…

There are no Nazis that I’m aware of at the Boulevard Brewing beer hall, but they do have all kinds of craft beers which fedora-wearing hipsters, sporting bad facial hair and ironically-uncool horn rim glasses will sip while holding a group discussion about the “notes” and “aftertastes” of each beer and you’d think it wouldn’t be my kind of place at all, but they have one beer called Bourbon Barrel Quad and it’s brewed in bourbon barrels and supposedly absorbs some of the flavor of the bourbon which may or may not be true, but it definitely has 12.2 percent alcohol and after two glasses you can’t stand up because your quads go numb.

In fact, two glasses of Bourbon Barrel Quad will knock you on your ass so it’s pretty efficient drinking and I once encouraged a friend of mine to try some by saying:

“This one has notes of alcohol.”

I had any pretension about beer drinking knocked out of me the first time I visited Jason Kendall’s house and he handed me a Bud Light and I asked if he’d ever had a “Black & Tan” (half Bass Ale, half Guinness Stout) and once I got done explaining what it was, Jason looked at me like I just admitted I liked dressing up as a woman because the lingerie felt kinda sexy, pointed at the beer in my hand and said:

“Yeah…well that one’s a Bud Light.”

Jason drinks Bud Light, drives Fords and doesn’t give a fuck what you think of that. (He’s my role model, which is probably a bad thing for both of us.) Over the years I’ve developed less interest in whether or not a beer is “hoppy”…I’m in it for the alcohol.

Hand-crafted cocktail connoisseurs

Whenever I hear that something is “hand-crafted” I often wonder what other part of the human body could have been used to craft something and if anyone knows of a bar where they make cocktails with their feet, let me know because I’d really like to see that, although I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want a Whiskey Sour stirred by some bartender’s big toe.

I recently got a piece of junk mail with the message “hand delivered” printed across it and I would have been more impressed if it said: “This one delivered by holding it between my butt cheeks” although I wouldn’t have opened it and throwing it away would have required use of my fireplace tongs and then I’d have to replace them, so I guess all in all I’ll settle for that “hand delivered” bullshit.

Funny how language changes over time and when I was growing up a “hand-crafted cocktail connoisseur” would have been known by the original title:

“Barfly.”

Face it: liking to drink alcohol does not make you special even if the bartender puts bits of tree bark in it or sings an aria from La traviata while mixing your cocktail and I just now remembered someone getting me to try a cocktail called “Coffee and Cigarettes” and it came as advertised; it tasted like someone spilled whiskey and coffee in a used ashtray and then put it in cocktail glass and now that I think about it, I’m not 100 percent sure that isn’t exactly what happened. 

Sex addicts

You like sex.

Wait…you like sex a lot.

Gotta say that doesn’t exactly make you special, although “sex addict” is a good thing to have on your resume because when you get caught watching porn or stuffing a dollar bill in a pole dancer’s thong, you can blame it on your “addiction” which means you really can’t help yourself and will need therapy for the uncontrollable urges pretty much everyone else who ever lived and didn’t grow up in the Catholic Church has also suffered.

(And to be honest, I’m pretty sure Catholics like sex just as much as anyone, they just feel really, really guilty about it.)

According to a Time.com article some experts don’t think sex addiction is a real thing and claiming it exists may be harmful because it’s based on the assumption that there’s a “normal” amount of interest in sex, when human beings are actually all over the place when it comes to sexual relations and we’re trying to get people with sticks up their ass to accept that idea and putting a pejorative label on sexual interests isn’t helpful. If you want to read more about that, here’s a link to that article:

https://time.com/5016058/sex-addiction/

Also…

Even though a number of people (who I suspect have some really weird shit roaming around their subconscious) try to make everybody else feel bad about it, liking sex seems pretty natural and normal, so you might as well say, “I’m an oxygen addict” or “I just can’t overcome my addiction to water.”

These days everybody needs to feel like a victim and you can’t just be an idiot who spends too much time looking at porn and needs to get ahold of himself (in a non-literal way), you have to be an addict and can’t control yourself and it turns out I’ve got the exact same problem when it comes to Cool Ranch Doritos.

An Army of Avatars

I could keep going, but I gotta stop somewhere and it’s with Ernest Hemingway.

A while back PBS ran a Ken Burns series on Hemingway and as you might have heard, Ernest could be something of a horse’s ass. This was – at least in part – blamed on Ernest for creating an “avatar” (which in simpler times was called a public image) which Ernest felt he had to live up to, which doesn’t fully explain why he acted like a horse’s ass in private as well.

Anyway…

The point being, I think to some degree we all do the same thing and my kids (who are smarter than me and indicate evolution is still at work) pointed out early on that people were creating social media images of themselves – just look at the food I like and the beer I drink and the fabulous places I go – that don’t have much to do with reality and some sad kid sitting at home waiting for someone to “like” the Duck-Face selfie she just posted.

All this makes it sound like I think the younger generation is more screwed up than my generation, which is completely untrue. I think we’re all screwed up in different ways and handle it in different ways and that being the case, I think when our kids act out in some weird way we need to take some of the blame and if that doesn’t work, do the obvious:

Blame our parents for screwing us up.