Emotions can be fleeting things. Not like pee though. You’ve got tons of it. All in your balls.

I’m not sure to feel so nostalgic about the 90s like everyone else does. Granted, I understand the temptation that grips even me from time to time. It seems like a quaint dream at this point, a time when America essentially face no threat from anywhere in the world.

America had emerged from the Cold War in one piece. No other big bad kid on the block was going to push them around. There was a counter-culture movement in grunge that said, Nah man, fuck that, I’m a rebel, I’m gonna skateboard outside the community center and there’s nothing you can do to stop me (because my parents are divorced and living in different states). There was the need to be as extreme as possible, fart and shit jokes were really in for some reason, a lot of the music was fucking terrible, and yet there was a strange optimism that lingered over it. The economy was amazing – and growing like Bill Clinton’s penis aboard the Lolita express. But enough about that. I can’t let them hear me.

But anyway, back to this shit, yeah it was all good. Shit was chill. And good. If you were white. And a male. Otherwise you were kind of fucked. (read: not kind of, completely)

I’m aware of the privilege simply being white and “not poor” afforded me. I’m clear on what it means. All it does is create a faint feeling of guilt.

Guilt that I had enjoyed a lot about the 90s. There was an odd stability to that time and it wasn’t simply childhood naivete at work. Things were trending upward. We were fighting the power – sometimes, but not really. We were sticking it to the man – but buying and proudly wearing branded clothing. We demanded sincerity – and became absorbed by the Attitude Era in professional wrestling that gave rise to guys like The Rock.

It was all big and loud and extreme and annoying as fuck but we all loved it. Virtual reality was here! The kind you wore on your head and you looked like a giant, massive asshole, because you essentially donned a football helmet with two CRT screens two inches from your eyes just obliterating your iris and melting your brain. That shit was phat.

They’re all faint feelings, just remembrances that sit at the fringe shores in the back of my mind. Hidden back there, in the dust and filing cabinets of passwords for eight different email accounts so I can just cycle through to get a ton of free trials for shit, there is a point where everything seemed to be going alright. Simply because of one thing.

We had the power to ignore.

Now I’m not gonna get all preachy. That’s not what this is about. I just want to point out that the faintest of feelings can be a damn powerful thing if I remembered all that about a decade I was a child in.

I wonder if my daughter will have a future like that. Or do you think it’s going to be fucked up?

Nah. Shit will be fine.

I had been asked that question only once in my life. IT occurred to me, right in that very moment, that someone else must have been asked that very question, simply by law of averages. I also wondered in that moment if they felt as irrationally annoyed by it as I did.

Where was I when towers fell? It’s just a bit pretentious. Where were you when 9/11, a thing that happened 20 years ago, happened?

Uh.

In school.

Dipshit.

But for real, who gives a rats ass where you were when something big was going down? What about the thing being down? Ever try not having the audacity to think that your own memory should somehow supplant our collective experience and shared history?

Are you dense?

You wanna fucking fight dude?

No really, come to the fucking Denny’s off the freeway. I’m sitting here, shirtless, oiled up, with hard ass nipples and I’m ready to fucking rock and ready to fucking roll. I will spear you with my tip nips, my studded studs, my big gamble, just fucking try it bitch.

Don’t ever ask me about 9/11 again.