Dear Kids of America:

When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were when they were growing up; what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning uphill both ways through year 'round blizzards carrying their younger siblings on their backs to their one-room schoolhouse where they maintained a straight-A average despite their full-time after-school job at the local textile mill where they worked for 35 cents an hour just to help keep their family from starving to death!

And I remember promising myself that when I grew up there was no way I was going to lay a bunch of shit like that on kids about how hard I had it and how easy they've got it. But.... Now that I've reached the ripe old age of forty, I can't help but look around and notice the youth of today. You've got it so easy! Compared to my childhood, you live in a freaking Utopia! And I hate to say it but you kids today you don't know how good you've got it!

When I was a kid we didn't have The Internet -- we wanted to know something, we had to go to the library and look it up ourselves! And there was no email! We had to actually write somebody a letter -- with a pen! --and then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox and it would take like a week to get there! And there were no MP3s or Napster! You wanted to steal music, you had to go to the record store and shoplift it yourself! Or we had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ would usually talk over the beginning and mess it all up!

You want to hear about hardship? You couldn't just download porn! You had to bribe some homeless dude to buy you a copy of "Hustler" at the 7-11! Those were your options! We didn't have fancy stuff like Call Waiting! If you were on the phone and somebody else called they got a busy signal! And we didn't have fancy Caller ID Boxes either. When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was. It could be your boss, your mom, a collections agent, you didn't know! You just had to pick it up and take your chances!

We didn't have any fancy Sony Playstation video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games like "Space Invaders" and "Asteroids" and the graphics sucked! Your guy was a little square and in order to have any fun you had to rely on your imagination! And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen forever! And you could never win, the game just kept on getting harder and faster until you died! When you went to the movie theater there no such thing as stadium seating! All the seats were the same height! A tall guy sat in front of you, you were out of luck. And sure, we had cable television, but back then that was only like 20 channels and there was no on screen menu! You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on! And there was no Cartoon Network! You could only get cartoons on Saturday morning. Did you hear what I said you lazy little freaks? We had to wait all week for cartoons! That's exactly what I'm talking about! You kids today have got it too easy. You guys wouldn't have lasted five minutes back in 1980! .....But I don't want to lecture you.