my dearest,
the burden of age rests heavily upon me, and i grow weary of this world and its trappings. much as time came even for the fearsome spinosaurus and carcharodontosaurus to make way for new masters of this world, i fear it has come for me. please tell radiohead and nirvana that i love them
Not just two days past, my middle daughter sent me a missive via text
"I think I’d put Simon and Garfunkel’s greatest hits on the same level as pet sounds"
I added the quotation marks
That moment in the episode got a genuine laugh out of me. It never even occurred to me there might really actually be people watching the episode whose reaction to the joke would be the same as the character's. (Of course there were. Lots of them. Sigh.)
So now I'm a little bummed.
Time, you see. There's a tyranny to it, we all see it marching along, devouring everything it leaves in its path. We think of the past as present, call it "nostalgia", our own experiences are so important, how we lived them. But it's all just the shit that's left after time is done eating.
Somehow when we were kids we could figure out who Peter Lorre or W.C. Fields were after they popped up in a Bugs Bunny cartoon and we didn’t have clickbait articles walking us through it.
Had a similar experience today when a co-worker was talking about “that new Netflix movie about rugby players becoming cannibals after their plane crashes in the Andes” and I said “Oh so it’s a new adaptation of Alive?” and absolutely no one knew what I was talking about
Nothing new here. Kids miss jokes and check it up and learn. And they have better tools than we did.
It’s not like I, at age 15, went ”rofl that Virgil reference was spot on lol lol”
Well…actually I did. And that’s a little sad.
If we had to be alive at the time of every cultural milestones in human history, then nobody works be talking of Shakespeare, Mozart, Beethoven etc... IMHO
unrelated but at age 9 i sang "mrs. robinson" with a children's church choir b/c the director was too naive to know where the song was from but it had "Jesus loves you" in it and that was good enough for him and all the parents were SHOOK during our performance
Around 2010 or so I worked with a younger guy who said he couldn't watch Family Guy because he spent all the time trying to look up all the references so he could get the jokes and some of them were really hard to search for (like when Peter does the Axel Foley theme).