FACT #1:





With all the scientific information available on the negative side effects of doing drugs, it seems you'd have to be an idiot or suicidal to try anything harder than the occasional sip of wine cooler. But we're living in a post-War on Drugs world; we are the aftermath of Ronald "Leatherface" Reagan's attempt at shaking the collective pockets clean of any sort of quasi-illegal drug related paraphernalia.



On the flip-side, our parents came up during the late '60s, early '70s, an era known for popularizing weed and cocaine and introducing LSD. It's shocking to know that LSD was still prescribed by psychiatrists until 1966. Though modern day psychiatrists are known for over-prescribing between ADD and depression medications, that doesn't even get close to approaching the hilarity of being prescribed LSD. It's like, "You're feeling down? Well, lick the back of this Mickey Mouse sticker and get ready to think you're flying through a cloud of butter. That'll take those blues away right quick."



Now, I'm not condoning drug use. It's clearly bad for you. Just about every major drug fucks up your brain and liver and even weed, often cited by burnout loser dickheads as being "all natural," can give you some serious lung cancer. Dude, just cuz something grew up from the ground doesn't mean lighting it on fire and then breathing in the smoke won't mess you up real good. It's not like you're not gonna die from smoke inhalation if you lay on the ground during the middle of forest fire. Because you are, you white dredlock-having motherfucker.



But the fact that drugs are bad for you only makes them cooler. Shit that's bad for you is cool. Getting strung out and endangering your life might not be the coolest thing in the world, but it's certainly cooler than sitting a few yards away from someone getting drugged out, frowning at them. It's certainly true we're more prudent and safer than our parents on this topic. But we're definitely lames as well.





FACT #2:



Here's something with no caveats, no exceptions, no nothing... this is a flat out fact. The coolest mainstream artists recording right now are probably The White Stripes and Beck, and both are barely mainstream as it is.



That, versus our parents' typical radio selection--The Beatles. The Who. The Rolling Stones. Pink Floyd. Led Zeppelin. Jimi Hendrix. Dylan. Dude, just stop me, because it's getting depressing. The mainstream, RADIO music our parents got to listen to as CASUAL listeners blows anything we've got now out of the water. And this fact keeps getting truer (and sadder) as time goes on. Kids now are listening to Justin "Testicle Breath" Timberlake, R "Piss Breath" Kelly and Linkin "Testicles covered in Piss and Poo Breath" Park. The music scene is depressing both fiscally and creatively. Our parents have our asses checkmated on this one.







FACT #3:



Next time you're at your parents' house, dig up some old pictures of them. Not the crap with you and your siblings in it, not the BS with your dad in a suit or your mom at pottery class. Look deep, for those old yellowed pictures. Now look at your dad's face in those pix. More likely than not, he's got an amazing beard or mustache. Now rub your hand over your bald patch of shame, right under your nose, where that amazing mustache should be. You're a failure.



Actually, it's pretty hard these days to maintain sweet ass facial hair. If it's not an employer barring you from growing a lip warmer, it's your girlfriend. Or, if you live in San Francisco, New York, LA or Miami, it's for the fear of being mistaken for someone named Brucie or Lance. There's every reason not to grow some carpet thick lip-perpillars. But that still doesn't hide the fact that your dad had the cool and collected confidence to harvest his own private garden of manliness smack dead on his face, for the world to see. And you've gotta face it...in the facial hair department, he was cooler.

FACT #4:

Are you a serious movie buff? Do you consider Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola and Woody Allen some of your favorite directors? Well, they were making all their good movies when our parents were our age.



Now, this fact might be a bit controversial with some--many people consider the class of directors from the '60s and '70s overrated and they're more in love with the later mavericks like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. That's totally understandable. But even these guys were doing their best work during the late '70s, early '80s (still before our time, for the most part).



I also think a lot of the movies coming out now, stuff ranging from Tarantino to Apatow, is excellent work. I can watch "Pulp Fiction" fifteen times in a row without getting sick and the same can be said for "40-Year-Old Virgin." But if you've ever seen Tarantino on a late night talk show or read an Apatow interview, you'd have to give it to me that these guys are straight dorks. Amazing directors, yes. But straight dorks. That's tooootally fine because I'm a dork too, as are most of you guys. But dudes like Sam Peckinpah, Robert Altman, they din't have one shred of nerdiness. Even Woody Allen was banging hotter chicks than Judd Apatow, his modern day equivalent. The situation with our movies is nowhere near as hopeless as our music, but the fact still remains that our parents' generation had cooler flicks and cooler filmmakers. Bladow!

FACT #5:

This is sort of like the "they did more drugs" one but having more sex is clearly cooler (for the most part) than doing more drugs. You know the drill--there wasn't as much information telling people not to have sex, there was no AIDS until the tail end of our parents' "loose period" and even then it was still mostly in the gay community and, most importantly, free love was the message of the day.



I mean, yes, college was fun for sexual enlightenment and all, but getting chicks to agree to sex was still SOME work. Now imagine the summer of '69. Or even better, ask your dad how he did that summer. And get ready to shit yourself. My dad has recalled numbers in the hundreds from that summer alone, all disease and pregnancy free and all basically given to him without so much as an eyebrow raised at the chicks in question before receiving an offer to get down. Somewhere in the '80s, all these chicks got professional and frigid, but until then, seeing tits and muff wasn't something you worked towards. It was expected.



God damn you, Women's movement! Now I have to worry about how sober I am, how sober she is, the right way to ask her, whether or not she's on the pill, whether or not I have a condom, where I'll be having this sex (another detail my dad didn't have to worry about...people were screwing in the parks en masse back then, dude)...it's all so hard these days, and oh so depressing. Again, I of course think it's great that women are more in tune with their own feelings these days, that they're more liberated from the feelings of servitude and sexual duty to us guys, etc. I think women as second class citizens is total bullshit. But all this amounts to everyone (women included) busting far fewer nuts (yes, women can bust nuts too...right?). Which makes us toootally uncool, dude.



In the end, it seems, progress makes you lame. I mean, the internet is making us lamer than our parents too. DVD players, video games...all the new diversions are nowhere near as cool as a game of beer league softball like my dad used to play. But in the end, I'll just admit I'm not as cool as my dad, count my money, enjoy my possessions and take comfort in knowing that I'm a square. Yes, I'm undersexed. But I'm overpaid. And that's what counts, son.

