Seriously — grab your groovy glasses, because my favorite word is a lot to handle.
See …
I was born and suckled in the 1970s.
Bullied and gilded in the 1980s.
By the 1990s, I knew it all and knew who I was. Except, shit … I didn’t know anything at all.
I pretty much did know who I was, though. Uptight by 18, uptighter by 22, and squeak-when-you-walk-tight by 26.
But that’s OK, because I had some pretty cool things to fall back on, and to look back on.
I mean, my dad wore paisley shirts and saddle oxfords and a dachshund-sized pornstache in the 1970s, for god’s sake.
And my mom wore bouffant hair and applique polka dots on her shirts. She let me pick them off and eat them (she didn’t know that part — I think?), too.
My aunts and uncles wore platform shoes and long boy-hair and no shirts and rode motorcycles with sissy bars and hot chicks (who are now stodgy aunts) on the back.
And on the playground, my friends wore duck-ass haircuts (Indiana is always 20-30 years behind the mainstream) and flat-soled hand-me-down shoes.
My teachers taught us how to make turkeys by tracing our hands, protected us from tornados by reading Judy Blume while we crouched under our desks, and paddled the demons out of us if we dared to say shit. Or crap. Or darn.
That childhood was freakin’ groovy is what I’m trying to say. It was magical.
And the 1980s end of it was pretty enchanted, too, in a Smurfberry and Pac-Man sort of way.
But, man, let me tell you.
Even today, whenever the seriousness and chronic butt-hurt of the modern world gets under my thin skin …
Whenever I get honked off because I got thirty-seven grains of Gorgonzola on my frous-frous salad instead of thirty-nine grains …
Whenever my wife is honked of because our kid hasn’t called in three days …
Whenever the god-forsaken internet is dragging so heavy that I can’t even stream 90-Day Fiance while I write a blog post, surf Facebook, watch people falling on their asses on YouTube in the background, and listen to Clapton on Pandora all at once …
Well …
It’s then that I try to remember my roots.
Take a deep breath, jefe. Stop and smell the poppies.
Look at the beautiful space around you, man. The colors … the colors!
Yeah, life, and the world, can still be pretty groovy if you just let them.
