The other day I was impressed by a large naval instrument. By that I don’t mean a tool used by someone in the Navy, but rather something that looked big enough to be a tool attached to the skin on a girl’s belly button. At first I thought she might be a construction worker with a unique tool belt but then I just realized I must be getting old because I’m thinking, “Why would somebody do that?”
Even though belly button rings are not new, neither is doing stupid things. (Oh no, I just realized I sounded like Andy Rooney for a second – I’m not that old!) But seriously, come on. And what is with those big hoops that people put in their ear lobes that stretch them out so much they look like a reject from National Geographic.
And then there are tattoos. It’s an old art but a body should not be a canvass, plus sometimes it could get embarrassing depending where you get the tattoo. Like if a girl gets one on her ass and then the tattoo artist says, “Anything else you want, there’s plenty of room back here for more.” Or a man could get his girlfriend’s name on his sexual part and there’s not enough room for all the letters. It’s especially embarrassing if her name is Joy or Cam or something like that.
These are habits mostly of the younger generation but it’s not like my Baby Boomer generation never did anything odd back in the day. In the 50s and 60s lots of young guy’s got a haircut called a “duck’s ass.” This, actually, was quite brilliant when you think about it, because it gave these guys the perfect rebuttal if someone accused them of having their head up their ass. They could reply to that with, “Nuh-uh. That shows what you know. I don’t have my head up my ass. I have a duck’s ass on my head. Boy, are you stupid!” Girls were not immune to weird do’s either, just pick up any yearbook from the 60s and have a good laugh. But, then, I wouldn’t say they are nearly as strange as what you’d see if you walked onto a high school or college campus today.
Baby Boomers also spawned the drug age, but again, what occurred back then was mild compared to the drug scene today. I believe it was Plato who said, “All this crap has to start somewhere.” Okay, I don’t know for a fact that he said that but I wouldn’t be surprised. He was a philosopher, after all.
Even video games didn’t start with the current generation. That started with pacman in the eighties and even the precursor to that would have been pinball machines. I know that because I used to watch Happy Days and the Fonz played pinball machines.
The fact is that every generation has their own oddities and idiosyncrasies and every generation thinks it’s better than the one before it. Probably, in twenty years there will a law passed that it will be illegal to talk into your verbal text machines while flying your hovercraft less than ten feet off the ground. Yeah, right, like there will be a machine that you can actually talk to people and not have to type out a message to text them!
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