Birthdays were great growing up. My parents would let me choose anything that I wanted for dinner. And what did I always choose? A bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. It wasn't called "KFC", because we didn't need all thise silly abbreviations like "Dunkin'" or "24/7", or any of that horseshit.
There weren't any stand alone Kentucky Fried Chicken's in the 70's and 80's, at least not where I lived in Maryland . You could only find the Colonel's secret recipe at Gino's restaurant in Langley Park. Gino's was owned by Gino Marchetti of Baltimore Colt's fame. How cool is that? Freaking Gino's in Langley Park. My father would let me eat in the car on my birthday. By the time I got home, we had crushed almost the whole bucket. My Uncle George would come over to our house on my birthday. He would bake a birthday cake from scratch and decorate it. We didn't think anything about it, him baking the cake from scratch. It was common back then to bake from scratch.
We didn't go out to eat like everyone does nowadays. Only on special occasions like a big 80 pound football win did we go to McDonald's. Shit, I order food all the time for my kids, and we spend a lot of meals eating at the diner. And everything is always 100 dollars at least. One hundred dollars. That used to buy a family sized visit or two to the grocery store.
And people are so weird nowadays. There is an Alabama player who has his own nail polish line, and he isn't embarrassed about it at all. That's fucking weird. And youth sports are weird, all the ego's and crazy parents and shitty coaches. It wasn't that big of a deal in the old days. It was just a bunch of kids having fun. Sure, we wanted to win. But people weren't shooting people in the stands over a bad call. I was listening to a youth baseball coach the other day, cuss out his 13 year old team for losing. Fuck this and fuck that. To 13 year olds. A grown ass man talking like that to a bunch of kids. You are a man. You don't cuss out 13 year olds. As soon as you start cussing them out, they are only focused on the cuss words. Be a teacher. And get this: They aren't trying to screw up. It's killing them when they lose, and piling on just shows some weak ass shit as a man. A man does not act that way. It's epidemic, though. I had great experiences with my little league coaches. But my parents weren't paying 2500 a season (they would never) and travelling to Tennesee for a tournament. They wouldn't have done that, either. Too expensive. And as soon as a coach or parent acted like an ass, my Dad would have pulled me from the team and that would be that. But nobody acted like that to kids in the 70's and 80's. Like I said, it wasn't so big of a deal. Now, it's life or death. Grown men cussing at kids. Crazy. I'm about done with all of that shit. Maybe it's me. Maybe it is time to quit swimming against the tide so much. Maybe I need to jump up and down and act like a bitch when things don't go my way. That's what men do these days.
You begin to wonder if the way the world is now is just a bad dream and we will wake up and Clint Eastwood will be in a new western or a new Dirty Harry and everyone would be proud of the USA again.
I'm afraid that this world has become too much for me, with all of the information that you are bombarded with every damn day. And I can't believe how fast all of it changed. One day we are riding in the back of a station wagon going to get a 5 dollar pizza and the next thing ya know, there is Artificial Intelligence. And these fucking phones. Man, they kill me. And now I feel naked without it.
How did we do it? How did we find anything without GPS? I'm serious. We had maps, or we stopped at a gas sation and asked for directions. Three stop signs, take a right, third house on the right. Wait, did he say two stop signs or three? No phone when you broke down in your car so either you walked to a gas station to use the pay phone or you knocked on somebody's door and asked to use the phone, or for them to make a call for you. Happened all the time. I'm not approachiung a stranger's house these days and nobody I don't know personally is coming in my house.
It all is happening very fast and in a few years, the kids these days will be talking like these days now were archaic and simple.
