I’VE GOT A LITTLE LIST

11 Reasons Not To Be So Nostalgic About Your 1970s Childhood:

1. Tennis shoes were advertised as being able to make “skateboard-style turns” . . . and you believed it.
2. The only Disney movies of note were Robin Hood and The Rescuers . . . and they both stunk to high heaven.
3. Nobody believes your argument about how Atari was superior to the PS2, especially the part about how new-style video games just aren’t violent enough and fail to teach children that the universe is a hostile place.
4. You cried at the end of Bridge to Terabithia, didn’t you?
5. For every good Saturday morning cartoon in the 70s, there were three shows like Devlin, These Are The Days, and The 3 Robonic Stooges.
6. You were there for the first cynical attempt to force soccer down America’s throat.
7. Likewise, you remember when “reality TV” meant stuff like “Real People” and “Battle of the Network Stars”–yet, somehow, you maintain an attitude of smug superiority whenever “Survivor” or “The Real World” is mentioned.
8. You remember what it’s like to get a friction burn from the T-strap of an SST car. And what it feels like to get Bactine splashed on it.
9. While punk and new wave were happening, you were stuck listening to Peter Frampton and the Bay City Rollers.
10. Sometimes, when you close your eyes, you can remember the clingy/itchy feeling you got from all those synthetic fabrics, and how they offered no insulation or pretection from the wind, and the massive, atmosphere-igniting static electricity shocks you got from walking across a shag carpet in your DuPont finest, and the sick, creepy memory of it all causes you to wonder why anybody would ever bring the styles and culture of that hideous decade back, then you realize that this ill-placed nostalgia is not being driven by our own generation but the one after us, and you also wonder if the baby boomers feel this way about what we Gen Xers did to the 60s, then you remember that they didn’t care, because they’d figured out how to make money off our naivete, and doggone if the slippery creeps aren’t doing it again, this time to their own children, which they were too busy to have back in the 70s because you couldn’t bring your kids to the est seminar. Thus, you brace yourself for the inevitable wave of 80s nostalgia, which should be starting any day now, for which you are perfectly positioned, since you still have all your old “Bloom County” books on the bookshelf.
11. Erm . . . no, you traded all those in at the used book store for the first three “Far Side” books sometime around ‘93. Crud.