I’m sitting here and it’s almost 1:00. I should be in bed but I love this solitude. Tonight I am enjoying multiple pours of mostly bourbon and trolling TikTok. And I’m thinking of my generation. I know life before color tv, or uhf , or rockets into space. I’m before fm radio, or the Vietnam war. I’m from a time where our biggest adversary was the USSR, and everything from Japan was inexpensive and cheap. I remember landing on the moon. Transistor radios and real to real tape recorders, and I remember seeing the first remote control for a television and it was huge. I remember flying in a plane and smoking like a freight train the whole flight. Smoking in the hospital…. I remember when they first provided a nonsmoking section in restaurants. Nonsmoking. I am getting ready for another pour…. What will it be? LuxRow it is. I’m from a time of journals and party lines, and wives who could not drive, and kids who quit school at 16 to work on the farm, got married and start their own families. Live poor lives and send the next generation into the same lifestyle because they knew no better. I saw cable tv when it was invented and I remember the biggest things were the PTL club and MTV, and CNN. I’m from a time that watched a divided Germany from the west side for 2 years, hoping the USSR would not attack from the east side, and 10 years later watch the very wall that divided them fall. Then I watched the USSR fall. I remember Betamax video recorders. I was there when the internet started and I was there when home computers were sold for the first time. AOL. I watched music go from 78s to 33, to 8 track, real to real to cassettes, then to cds. I had them all. Every one. I saw the very first video game and I played it in a mall in Louisville Kentucky with my cousin, and it was called Odyssey I think, and we were playing a game called pong in the early 70’s. I remember when we got our first cell phones and we had to split 250 minutes between 2 phones. I remember a time before GPS when we used fold out maps. When you actually had to stop and ask for directions. I remember the first IPhone…. And texting. When music went digital with something called Napster. When social media began. I watch us go from American exceptionalism to a country that needed safe spaces and support animals. I watched us go from a very proud people to a very needy people. I am the last generation to remember these things. I am the last.

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