It’s time for the fifth annual Uncollecting episode. This time around, I take a look at an episode of the A&E show Hoarders that features a couple named Claire and Vance, whose enormous book collection has taken over their house and their lives. Then, I look at the “Where are they now” update episode from 13 years later.
Apple Podcasts: Pop Culture Affidavit
For my 18th birthday, I got a $25 gift certificate to Tape World.
It was 1995 and I hadn’t bought a cassette in at least a few years. But in The Smith Haven Mall, there was still a store called Tape World. I’d never set foot inside of it and I don’t think anyone I knew had either. Sam Goody was right around the corner, sitting in prime position across from Aeropostale and The Gap, beckoning music lovers with its neon entrance and posters advertising the latest albums. Tape World was a blocky ‘80s-lettering sign above a thin store that was tucked between 5-7-9 and The Bombay Company. I actually had to check the mall directory to find it.
The Eighties didn’t so much end in 1990; rather, they slowly faded into obscurity, and that has me thinking about where they eventually went. Tape World, for instance, has its place in our cultural examination of the decade, as one of Michael Galinsky’s photos for The Decline of Mall Civilization shows a blonde girl with quintessential mall hair walking by the store and its wood paneling facade. A look through my memories of the malls near me (and yes, malls, plural–it was Long island) shows a number of places where time seemed to stand still well after the decade had changed over while simultaneously trying to keep up with the times. Gardiner Manor Mall had an ancient Sears, an Orange Julius, and a bridge to Stern’s. The South Shore Mall had Captree Corners, a late-1970s mini mart of small shops and a fountain I loved to throw pennies into when I was six. The Sun Vet Mall was where 1981 went to die.
Smith Haven, started out as a mid-century mall of the late 1960s with fountains, Alexander Calder sculptures, and the low-lit atmosphere that I associate with the era. It was a twenty-minute drive from Sayville and when I was little, I loved going to “the mall with the fountains.” However, it underwent a massive renovation in 1987 and emerged with a brighter neon-tinged and mauve-tiled palette that has come to typify the Eighties.
The renovation was hyped even as it was going on. When the mall was getting its makeover, there were radio commercials that sang “We’re building the place of your dreams … Smith Haven Mall!” Later, the commercials changed to “Your wildest dreams will come true … Smith Haven Mall!” I don’t know what “wildest dreams” can come true at Jean Country or Casual Corner, but I will take their word for it. The mall was also the home to a local news special on WLIG 55, “At the Mall With Drew Scott.” It remains one of the more amazing artifacts of 1980s Long Island as did the mall itself until it underwent another renovation in the mid-2000s.
That’s probably why it’s always stayed alive while so many shopping malls have died. A hot place in the Eighties, Smith Haven was also a destination for Nineties mall-ness because it had a Gap, Aeropostale, Structure, Express, Limited, Eddie Bauer, Bath and Body Works, Victoria’s Secret, Disney Store, and Warner Brothers Studio Store. But it was still Eighties building that held onto that part of its identity with stores like Tape World; Sssassy, which was a real-life version of Over Our Heads, the store from the last few seasons of The Facts of Life; and the cutlery store Hoffritz. Because honestly, nothing is more Eighties than a store devoted entirely to cutlery.
The faded Eighties aesthetic in the era of grunge was simultaneously out of place and in line with those who have come to be known as “Xennials”. Stuck between our cool older Generation X and annoying little Millennial siblings, the Xennial microgeneration is the middle child–ignored because mom and dad had already done everything for those older siblings and the younger ones were showing much more promise. We were raised by people going through the motions, wearing hand-me-downs and finding ourselves too old for anything new. I don’t think it was spurred on by anything other than bad timing. We had our peak teenage mall years during the first Bush recession where the economy and the housing market both bottomed out, especially on Long Island, so that meant that development and progress were put on pause and we did our best to use our fading institutions of commerce.
Ironically–appropriate for the Nineties, I know–this made parts of Long Island feel like a museum exhibit. In recent years, there has been a ton of McMansioning and townhome development. But in the late 1990s, there was still a lot left over from decades past. My grandmother’s neighborhood in New Hyde Park had houses that had remained unchanged since the 1950s. Downtown spaces in Patchogue, Amityville, and Huntington still resembled their 1950s and 1960s selves. Sayville Pizza looked like it hadn’t been updated since 1975. Even as a kid, I wondered what ghosts were sending echoes through their halls and walls, and whatever patina or grime covered the Island led me to associate authentic with “worn.”
Of course, such things do not always last, especially when the economy improves and developers can give yet another facelift to a mall or neighborhood. The candy-colored late 90s and the housing boom of the 2000s meant knocking down the useless buildings to put up Target (as they did with the Gardiner Manor Mall) or turning a shopping center property into a housing development. In some cases, the limited space provided by an area in Queens or Nassau County meant a creative way to drop a Barnes & Noble into a strip mall. In other, like in Suffolk County, you could bulldoze acres of woods to create an outlet mall. I’m sure nobody really noticed when Rickel and Pergament gave way to Lowes and Home Depot unless someone prompted them. It’s such a suburban aesthetic to embrace whatever is new. “They’re putting in a Whole Foods.”
Yeah, they give us a lot.
They’ve even given us the past, preserving the Eighties in places that are comfortable and happy–movies, marathon weekends on radio stations, your kids’ spirit week costumes. But it’s all cosplay and manufactured nostalgia put forward by those who stand to earn money or cache off of our memories: memes, influencers who pretend they “are Eighties”, bad TikToks of someone bobbing their head and pointing out that random items existed or making lists of cartoons “nobody heard of” yet every single commenter remembers. Yet, that’s the product of our culture, which is one that has been manufactured for generations.
Tons of ink has been spilled about suburbia, stripping down its vinyl siding to show the flaws underneath andI want to make some pretentious point about how because the Eighties were actually stripped of all substance and repackaged, we are stuck in a cultural Allegory of the Cave and the people who sold us the American Dream are making money off of that, but I’ll just look for where the past has receded and the decade truly remains. Because it’s not a place everyone goes. It’s in a paragraph of the last chapters of a U.S. history textbook. It’s documentaries buried underneath a pile of true crime exposés on second-tier streaming services. It’s in a bin in the attic, the back of a closet, or on the shelves and racks of thrift stores.
A few months ago, I was in one of those antique malls where people offload things that don’t qualify for an appearance on Antiques Roadshow but still think are worth more than a couple of bucks at a yard sale. Among stacks of old Corningware, old country albums, military ephemera, and old guitars were a number of video games, baseball cards, toys, and other things I recognized, like a Le Clic, a disk film camera that came in an assortment of colors, all of which screamed Eighties. These were more comforting than any meme or slapped-together neon wardrobe I’ve seen on a high schooler. They felt lived in and I could picture some kid with a questionable haircut wearing an Ocean Pacific T-shirt once collecting and playing with all of them.
In the ten or fifteen minutes I spent in Tape World thirty years ago, I stuck to Eighties music. I’d like to say that a store called Tape World demanded an Eighties music purchase, it was because CDs were expensive and I wanted to get the most out of my $25. The Fast Times at Ridgemont High soundtrack on CD was just enough to allow me to dive into a bargain bin and fish out The 80s Rock + On, a K-Tel produced 80s compilation cassette that would live in my Walkman or the tape deck of my Hyundai Excel until I offloaded my cassettes in the mid 2000s. So yes, I did buy a tape at Tape World.
Growing up in the suburbs, personal modes of transportation were very important, and I know I’m not the only person who can describe down to the detail each tricycle, big wheels, or bike they owned when they were in elementary school and junior high. The reason for this isn’t anything profound or even some great secret to reveal–they were ours and as we got older became how we got our first taste of independence.
And that was mostly true when it came to our bikes, which we all graduated to sometime around the first grade, leaving our big wheels in the garage, taking the first steps toward becoming a “big kid.” I’m not sure when BMX bikes specifically became the thing, although a quick look at the history of BMX says that they first started to appear in the 1970s. I imagine that by the 1980s they had become ubiquitous and that made them the standard for kids’ bikes. They certainly didn’t take up as much space as a ten-speed and were certainly not as unwieldy as a bike with one of those big banana seats (or the one with the baby seat on the back that my mom had — how were those even safe?). In my hometown of Sayville, you went to Friebergs, aka The Bike Works, which at the time was located next to the video store (it’s now a tire place, although Sayville Bike Works is still in business and now just down the road). I remember the place being full of bikes and smelling of new rubber whenever I went there to get tire tubes replaced or my chain repaired.
I got my first–and only–BMX bike for Christmas when I was about five; it was a black and yellow Columbia BMX, complete with a bell and a speedometer/odometer. It would take me a while to learn how to ride it without the training wheels (borne out of a constant sense of dread and a need to practice that haunts me to this day), but once I did I was off and used it more than anything I owned, joining my friends on trips to whwerever we were headed in the small radius within which we were allowed to travel.
Sadly, my bike was not cool. Then again, neither was I, but I didn’t know that when I was in the first grade and had fun skidding out using my coaster brakes; nor did I know that in order to be cool, you had to own a specific brand of bike. Shit, until I was probably in about the fifth grade, I didn’t know that different brands of bikes existed and which ones embued you with a particular amount of status. But there were and they did and said brands usuall had kickass names like Mongoose or Predator, which were definitely cooler sounding than Columbia. The premier brand, though? That was GT. Why this was the case, other than their being pretty expensive and made for the competitions you’d see in movies like Rad or much later on the X-Games, was beyond me. A look at the history of GT shows that they were revolutionary in their design and were what more or less put the idea of BMX on the map, so I guess that means they were kind of like the Morey Boogie Board of bikes or something.
BMX competition was never something I was going to do; plus, I loved my bike. It got me everywhere I needed to go and while I don’t like to wax nostalgic about some sort of “more innocent golden age” that never actualy existed, suburbia in the Eighties was a time when you could ride your bike anywhere and park it outside a store or lay it on someone’s front lawn without locking it up. In junior high, I’d have two bikes stolen from me, one of a number of times when kids in my town proved to be absolute dicks. Seriously–who just takes someone’s bike? And whate were they doing with them? Were there BMX chop shops? Was there a black market where they sold them for a cheap price? Did their parents ever notice that their kid just randomly had a new bike?
Anyway, people kitted out their GTs. Plastic spokes, various colored tires, and pegs on the back were all things that got you noticed and the kid down the street from me had all sorts of accessories on his; he also kind of did tricks, most of which were popping wheelies and bouncing the bike while standing on the pegs. That doesn’t sound like much, but fifth and sixth grade came with a lot of new insecurities and with that came the desire to impress people and show off, and I remember wanting to look cool like that.
My chance came in 1987 when scooters became a craze and I got the GT Zoot Scoot for Christmas. These had started to become a thing over the past several months and it seemed like a lot of people in my fifth grade class were “getting them for Christmas” (i.e., asking for them and just assuming their parents had already made the purchase). I decided to throw my hat in that particular ring and probably asked for a “GT Scooter” instead of just a scooter, although I don’t know if any other company made those scooters. At any rate, I came down the stairs on Christmas morning to a “Tacky Eighties Blue” (as my wife calls it) Zoot Scoot with white handlebars, white wheels, and pegs on the back.
I cannot express how Eighties–and I by Eighties I mean exactly what people think of when they hear the word Eighties–this was THe color was electric, the board was a skateboard deck mounted to the frame, and the logo was wirten in Eighties-era block lettering. It looked like it had been born in California, which was the center of all popular culture at the time. I mean, I knew so many people who were obsessed with the skater culture coming out of the L.A. area; the halls of my elementary school were filled with people wearing Vision Street Wear whom had shaved heads with long bangs hanging over their faes. So getting this scooter meant that I was in the cool crowd. Well, in my own mind and a few days over winter break, anyway. When I returned to school in January, my social status reasserted itself.
For the week between Christmas and New Years, I was all over that scooter. I would ride it up and down the blcok and try tricks–in cluding a rad move where I jumped back and forth over the board then got on and took off. Okay, it wasn’t rad and camcorder footage shows that at 10 I actually looked like a complete tool. But hey, I had a GT.
Too bad it didn’t last very long.
The biggest problem with the Zoot Scoot and other scooters that were part of this fad was that it wasn’t a bike. You could go really far on your bike without expending a ton of energy; riding the scooter anywhere beyond a block or two was exhausting. Sure, people rode their skateboards everywhere, but the bulk of the Zoot Scoot made it a bit unwieldy. And none of us gave up our bikes for it, so when we all got together that’s what we rode and the Zoot Scoot sat in the garage, where it would linger for years as the tires deflated until they eventually gave it away.
Scooters are something that seem to come and go every decade or two, although whomever created the Razor Scooter made it a lot more portable than what I had back in the day. That’s a pretty expensive fad when you think about it, but it’s also indicative of that time and the age I was when I started to become stuck between being a kid and feeling I had to be something more.
Did you know that I once owned a copy of Trump: The Game?
For all I know, it might still be at my parents’ house, although they’re very good at cleaning out their basement every few years, so it probably left via donation years ago. Good riddance anyway, especially considering current circumstances; besides, I played that game maybe once. In fact, I don’t even remember what it was about other than I assume real estate. And knowing how unoriginal he is, it was probably some second-rate Monopoly rip-off. Then again, there are several second-rate Monopoly rip-offs out there.
I was in Target the other day and wandered by the games aisle, and I noticed how many board games seem to be available as well as how many of them seem to be the same game rebranded or with licensed characters. Many of them clearly are something you’d open up and look at but probably not even touch after you read the very detailed instructions for game play. Then again, I’m pretty sure that Target doesn’t care how many times you play a game you plunked down $39.95 for; the games could be gathering dust in a closet for decades and that store got their money.
I do have more than a few games sitting in my house collecting dust–stuff like the MTV game that’s a party game I couldn’t make heads or tailes of to “teach” everyone the one time we had people over and got into the board games after a few beers. I think we gave up after a few sentences of instructions and then played Superfight or dug out an old Trivial Pursuit game or something. No harm, no foul, I guess, although thinking about that does make me think of all the years I got board games for Christmas and all the years those board games went untouched after Christmas morning. Oh, some definitely got played–I would drag anyone I could into a game of the Young People’s Edition of Trivial Pursuit–but others like Trump: The Game sat on the shelf, forever passed over for another round of Sorry!
When I picture the closet in the basement that had all of our toys, what was always staring back at me from the shelf of board games were classics that got played to death–Scrabble, Trivial Pursuit, Monopoly, checkers, Don’t Break the Ice, Mouse Trap, Connect Four, Candy Land, Chutes and Ladders–along with a number of others that were popular at the time and became classics or wound up populating Goodwill stores for decades. But we always asked for them and I had enough of them to be able to make a pretty long categorized list, so let’s go.
(more…)In Reality Bites, Winona Ryder and Ben Stiller are on their first date and she tells him that hte Big Gulp is “the most profound, important invention of my lifetime.” They hook up after that and the plot follows its trajectory of a twentysomething coming-of-age romantic comedy, but the line stands out as one of the many witty pop culture observations that are simultaneously the film’s greatest strength and biggest weakness. Okay, maybe I’m just using the word weakness just so show contrast, but I will say that there are moments in the movie where the catchphrases and allusions work and other timeswhere they wind up feeling ham-handed and forced. The Big Gulp line could have been the latter if in the hands of someone other than Winona Ryder, but she’s being silly and flirting in that moment, which makes Ben Stiller melt (and I admit, me too). Besides, we all know that there is no way, with all of the technological innovation we have achieved since the end of the Second World War, that the Big Gulp of all things could possibly be that important.
Or could it?
7-Eleven has kind of always innovated when it comes to the convenience store, and especially when it comes to drinks. For instance, they invented the coffee to go cup in 1964 (although the iconic Greek Diner coffee cup debuted around the same time, so I guess you can make a case for either being first). What became the Big Gulp debuted in 1976, as according to Smithsonian magazine, 7-Eleven came out with a 32-ounce drink that was circular on the bottom and had a square top “like a milk carton” (the magazine’s authors and editors could not find an image of it and sadly neither could I). The cup was created at the requrest of Coca-Cola, who was looking for a way to shift more product, since back in the 1970s, they were still selling their drink in glass bottles that went for 50 cents and included a “deposit,” meaning you’d get money back upon returning the bottle. 7-Eleven sold the 32 ounce up at the price of 39 cents and advertised no deposit, and it was an immediate hit. When the cup’s manufacturer could not continue to produce it for a little while because they were moving their manufacturing to Canada and had to take a hiatus in operation, Dennis Potts–who was in charge o fthe product at 7-Eleven–commissioned a new design and the Big Gulp as we know it came to be.
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It’s time once again to dive into The Uncollecting! In this year’s episode, I take a look at the PBS series Legacy List With Matt Paxton along with articles that explore the “legacies” of our generations’ past, like brown furniture and memorabilia collections that are left behind. I also give my own update on how this now long-running project has been going.
Apple Podcasts: Pop Culture Affidavit
Pop Culture Affidavit podcast page
And here are links to the shows and articles that I talk about on the episode:
Legacy List With Matt Paxton Season 5, episode 5 on PBS (may need streaming subscription to watch)
I have a very vivid memory of the time I was in the first grade and I colored in a phonics worksheet with a big dark green crayon that was from the Whitman company. When I got it back, my answers were correct but my teacher, Mrs. Hickman, had written “Messy! You can do better!” That night, ashamed, i sat at the top of the stairs crying until my parents noticed and came to comfort me.
I suppose I should go on a long rant about Mrs. Hickman and how things like this are scarring to young children and how she destroyed any chance I had toward learning and because of her I never liked school, but I’m not. The truth is, she was one of my favorite teachers and I have great memories of her class. But what I can say is that my tendency toward messiness coupled with being a high-achieving student is probably the reason I’m such an anxious mess all the time (and may be some undiagnosed ADHD, but I’m no expert and I have no idea if that’s true). And I never could color outside the lines. When I think of the coloring books I had as a kid, I think of how so many pages were just scribbled all over. I also think of the ways I’d try to “correct” things when I was older, coloring around the mistakes and filling things in to make them look like they weren’t drawn by a manic toddler.
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Though the individualistic teenagers I teach might be loathe to admit it, they all wear the same clothes. Oh sure, they all find ways to express themselves, but self-expression via nonconformity in clothing has been de rigueur for adolescents since they first gained a sense of purchasing power in the 1950s or 1960s. They may all say they aren’t one of the sheep-like masses, but look in their closets and you’ll find a hooded sweatshirt, a pair of stretch leggings, and a beat-up pair of jeans in the same way my generation had an array of flannel shirts, alternative band T-shirts, a beat-up pair of jeans, and the Lands’ End Squall Jacket.
First introduced by the Dodgeville, Wisconsin-based clothier in 1983, the Squall is a medium-weight nylon jacket with a fleeced lining that is suitable for the majority of autumn, winter, and early spring when the weather is cold but not the Ice Station Zebra conditions that make you bust out your Lands’ End parka. The company says that it “best exemplifies all of our know how. Popular for its classic style and versatility, it’s reliably warm, and made from durable windproof waterproof fabric.” That definitely appeals to the parent in me who wants to make any $50-100 jacket last as long as possible, and Lands’ End definitely knows I want dependability when it comes to my purchase at least according to their explanation of why the jacket is called “Squall”:
Reminiscent of our nautical past, the word ‘squall’ usually defines a sudden gust of wind bringing on storms of rain, snow, or sleet. Not the most comforting of images, is it? But at Lands’ End, Squall has come to define dependable warmth for generations … you might not be a captain sailing a ship through the choppy ocean but you certainly weather your fair share of storms throughout the day. Unlike a typical squall, our winter jacket may not be the cause of the storm will certainly be there to keep you cozy, dry, and protected from whatever is brewing on the horizon.
(source: Landsend.com)
I know that’s a lot to say about a jacket, or any article of clothing for that matter but the Squall jacket earned that pretense. My parents bought me my first Squall jacket sometime in the fourth or fifth grade; it was blue and I’m pretty sure that my sister got a red or pink colored one, and they were pretty much permanent fixtures during the transitional seasons all the way through high school, not just in my house but in my school and town as a whole. It was, in a sense, part of the suburban uniform of the 1980s and early 1990s. Those of a certain vintage and upbringing may remember going outside in the late winter and early spring, riding around on your bike in search of a friend to play with, and once you found them trying to figure out what to do because both of your moms kicked you off the Nintendo and out of the house. Sometimes, you got a bunch of other people together and played a rough game of touch football; other times, you just kept riding around while carrying on a conversation about whatever kid or teen topics came up. The specifics really didn’t matter, to be honest; you just remember that you were wearing the jacket.
(more…)“We’re the fuck around and find out generation.”
“We raised ourselves.”
“We are the last generation of feral children.”
“We had no timeouts. It was a belt and you better not cry for long.”
“Most of us drank or smoked by the time we were 14.”
“There were no safe spaces. There were no trigger warnings.”
“We were the latch key generation.”
I’ve been seeing a lot of this on TikTok over the past couple of years regarding Generation X, especially when it comes to pushing back against the current generations of twentysomethings and teenagers. With all of us being middle-aged, it seems like thumping our chests about our childhoods as a response to getting dragged (or Gen Z TikTokers wondering why we aren’t getting dragged) is a favorite sport. And why not? It shows our inherent strength and our ability to be resilient as well as get things done, especially when nobody is looking. And for a generation who spent its formative years either being ignored or dismissed as “slackers”, it’s as good a response as any to our parents and their generation, who decided that we were a vast disappointment and our younger Millennial siblings were worth more attention.
There is something that really bugs me about this, though. Maybe it’s because I didn’t have as much of a hardscrabble, feral, latch-key kid life as some of my friends and peers, but Gen Xers posting videos where they say these things makes them sound like the Baby Boomers we have all grown to loathe. Isn’t “We were feral” just a different version of telling the kids that you walked uphill both ways through a foot of snow in order to get to school? I could have sworn that at some point, we told ourselves we weren’t got to pull that sort of toxic shit when we got to be our parents’ age. But here I am, seeing it on TikTok, in memes, and in copy/pasted Facebook ramblings from former classmates. Why are these people acting like they survived The Great Depression when they were simply a bunch of middle-class suburban white kids who grew up in the ’70s and ’80s?
Well, to answer this question, I’m going to break down what I quoted at the top of this post, starting with …
“We were the fuck around and find out generation.”
This is one I actually like, although credit where credit is due, we weren’t the original “fuck around and find out” generation. Our Greatest Generation grandparents, after all, fought a war against Fascism; equally important to our society were their older siblings, the Silent Generation. That generation–which actually makes up a good portion of the older set of Generation X’s parents–started or led the Civil Rights and antiwar movements of the 1950s and 1960s. We learned from their example that risks were worth taking. Now, some of our risks were mundane shit like flying over concrete on a skateboard without wearing a helmet or any other protection, but many other risks we took were significant. My peers and the older members of my generation have been vocal for environmentalism, LGBTQIA+ rights, and a number of liberal and progressive causes and reforms since we came of age during and at the end of the Reagan era. We’re not without our problems, of course, but being shoved aside by Boomers who sold out and were fucking around without a care of what would happen to future generations led to us calling upon other past examples and taking a stand,. We are passing that on to our Generation Z children.
But then there’s …
“We were the latch key generation.”
“We raised ourselves.”
“We were the last generation of feral children.”
Did we forget that “latch key kids” was literally a “concern topic” for talk shows like Donahue back in the 1980s? Now, I didn’t “raise myself” and in fact could have done with more independence because I have a major permission complex, but these statements aren’t always the flexes people think they are. The lack of parental supervision for many of us contributed to our resourcefulness as a generation, but forced maturity was not entirely beneficial. Some of my friends in junior high and high school spent a lot of time “raising” their younger siblings and keeping their households running smoothly. In most cases, that was out of economic necessity and I can’t faulty their parents for working as hard as they did to keep everyone’s head above water, but let’s recognize that this made childhood tougher and shorter. I wonder if some of my friends wish they had some of that time back or if they have even fully processed it as they raise their own kids. Which brings me to …
“We had no time outs. It was the belt and you better not cry for long.”
In defense of the TikTokers, a number of videos acknowledged how fucked up this was. In one video, a woman addressed how a lot of us have never fully come to terms with this because we suppressed our feelings and solved it by “moving on”. This led to us having pretty dark views on the world as well as very dark senses of humor (which I think is a slightly positive side effect). But I’ve also seen this expressed a number of times on social media as a point of pride and each time I see it that way, I’m puzzled because in my view, it’s not. My generation was one of the last where spanking and other forms of physical punishment were considered acceptable. I’m not saying that Millennial and Gen Z-ers didn’t get hit, but during my formative years there was a massive debate over spanking that led to it falling out of favor and largely out of practice.
As it should have. Hitting your kids is horrible and I’m not going to debate it. I have memories of getting yelled at and smacked with a wooden spoon as a kid. The hitting stopped early on, but getting yelled stuck around for a while. I don’t think I have fully processed all of it and I can’t tell you if I am ready to do a deep dive into it with my therapist either. I don’t classify is as abuse even though it was traumatic, because some people I grew up with were actually abused by their parents in an “I’ve seen this on an After-School Special” sort of way. These are the types of things that leave scars that never fully heal because when it came to our mental health as a generation, nothing ever got addressed. We were taught “not to talk about these things.” And therapy? Well, that might reflect poorly on our parents, so it never entered the conversation. Even if we wanted to get help, we didn’t know how. This led to …
“Many of us drank or smoked by the time we were 14.”
I will come out and say that this was never me. I didn’t have my first beer until I was 17 and aside from a couple of cigars in college, never smoked anything. Okay, I tried pot once and didn’t like it, but my dad did me a solid by quitting smoking back in 1987. However, my teetotaling as a teenager was because of a combination of not being popular enough to drink and being deathly afraid of the consequences of getting caught drinking. There’s more to that sentence that I’m not going to get into; instead, I’m going to address the statement above because while it is a bit of a brag, it has a very sharp other edge.
Drinking has been hugely glorified in television and movies for decades, with the party scene being a teen movie staple. With this glorification came a lot of destructive behavior and the amplification of toxic masculinity and rape culture, especially in the Eighties. As the Eighties became the Nineties, we learned more about rape and more women began to speak up about their experiences, but my generation still has a horrible track record when it comes to sexual violence. In fact, the current generation of youth appears to be learning from our mistakes; there’s certainly work to be done, but what I see on a regular basis has me optimistic.
But if we weren’t chasing the Platonic ideal of Animal House’s toga party, many in my generation were drinking and smoking by the time they were 14 because they were self-medicating. Like I said, nobody landed in therapy, and when they did it was for substance abuse because they had turned to alcohol and drugs to cope with their mental health issues. Some of my classmates went through rehab before they graduated, some eventually got help as adults, others wound up dying way too young, and a number of them continue to struggle. While I am sure the majority of my peers have a healthy relationship with alcohol, bragging about getting drunk at 14 simplifies this to the point where it ignores the very serious issues. But I think that for some of these TikTokers, it’s kind of the point because of one more line I want to discuss …
“There were no safe spaces. There were no trigger warnings.”
Now I know why my Spidey Sense tingled when watching these videos. I’m not sure what the political leanings are of every TikToker I watched, so I can’t lump them all under one umbrella …
… BUT …
… complaining about trigger warnings and safe spaces has become a favorite pastime of right-wing trolls for the better part of a decade. The image they like to conjure up is a kaleidoscope-haired, multi-pierced, multi-gendered, pride-flag-bedecked student at Berkeley or Oberlin frothing at the mouth about a professor assigning a short story where the main character gets a hangnail without warning them about said hangnail because reading about the hangnail made them curl up in the fetal position as they flashed back to the time they got a hangnail in the third grade.
I’m kidding.
Sort of.
Right-wingers are fucking insane when it comes perpetuating fallacies about the fragility of young people who refuse to go along with their ideals, and a number of these Fox News-viewing, QAnon-following choads are Gen Xers. This should surprise absolutely nobody; despite MTV’s efforts in the early 1990s to frame Generation X as largely liberal, we’re not a monolith because no generation is. But I can still be disappointed by the number of people my age or slightly older who agree with Tucker Carlson or Alex jones and were led that way by social media algorithms. I’m not being ridiculous; it’s not hard to go down the rabbit hole that begins with “Kids these days …” and ends with a membership in a Moms for Liberty Facebook group.
To quote one of our generation’s heroes: It’s a trap.
I mean, all of it really is. Generational discord is a construct that exists for media hits. I have fond memories of the decades in which I grew up and I love reveling in nostalgia for the simplicity of my childhood, especially on the days where the problems of the world are overwhelming. We should all be able to do that. But as a generation, it’s our duty to avoid the trap it presents. We’ve done a good job at starting to break cycles of toxic behavior and culture; let’s be the generation to break the cycle of losing perspective in favor of mythology and ego.
New Year, New You! At least that’s what they tell ourselves. Back in episode 96, I talked about my efforts to “uncollect” the piles of stuff I own. Well, it’s been a few years, so how is it going?
That’s what this episode is about. I talk about two books I read about hoarding and clutter, the Marie Kondo series Sparking Joy with Marie Kondo, and the “Curiosity Inc.” YouTube series before getting into my own experience with The Uncollecting. So come along and clear the clutter with me!
By the way, if you’re interested in the blog I have set up for The Uncollecting, check out theuncollecting.com.
Apple Podcasts: Pop Culture Affidavit
Pop Culture Affidavit podcast page
And here are some extras for you.
Eve O. Schaub’s page for The Year of No Clutter.
The GoodReads page for Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things.
The YouTube channel for Curiosity Inc.
The trailer for Sparking Joy With Marie Kondo:
Pop Culture Affidavit 