And for some reason I've always gotten along better with my elders than my peers. It could be because they remember such interesting things, while my peers are usually caught up in the latest fad. It could also be because some of them codgers have actually acquired some wisdom along the way. Unfortunately, now that the hippies and radicals and weirdos of the 60s are now in their sixties, a lot of that wisdom seems lacking because a lot of the life-forming events did not occur. Some of these people have never known a life, a job, or a car without air conditioning. Some of them have never known a day without television. Many of them have never been without a phone, or health insurance, or a tiny bag of joints.

Some of these folks lost their minds sometime around 1967 and never recovered. They have flashbacks of various sorts, involving conspiracies, old sexual escapades, and their favorite movies stars and pop stars. Some of them still dress and use the same hairstyles and makeup that they began to forty years ago. Some of them still talk the same way. Some of them were stupid to begin with, so it was a long walk off a short pier to silliness. Others were some of the best minds of their generation, turned into swiss cheese by poor chemical choices and a deviant lifestyle. Still others seem to have been infected at university, so much so that they haven't ever left. They were perpetual students who became part of the staff.

Just as modern TV and movies have become influenced by the memories of old TV and movies that the directors grew up with, the books of that generation are an incestous stew of influences from what they read in the sixties. The same applies to politics. Vietnam is not over in their heads, anymore than it is in the minds of the veterans. Modern political choices are being made on the basis of half-century old half-baked impressions of what they thought was going on. Reality don't work that way.

And the children of these nostalgic idiots are living in a land of images, sounds, and sensations that no futurist in 1966 could have imagined, because it is so unfuturistic and banal. Retro has become a self-recycling trend that chops off bits of crap that was boring forty years ago and tarts it up and spits it back out as even brighter and louder crap to a younger crowd who might be amazed to realize that the original crap was designed by PR flacks in the first place in order to sell more rayon. Retro also extends to guitars and amplifiers, with vintage-style planks of wood with wiring in them and tubed chassis with wooden cases and glued-on tolex going for three times what they would have cost forty years ago and not sounding much better.

The bad old days were stinky, scratchy, gritty and cold. They didn't have adult diapers then. They didn't have much of anything sugar-free. There was grease and smoke and filth everywhere. People dressed up in gloves and ties and hats and stank of hair-oil, hair-spray, dry-cleaning fluids, tobacco smoke, Lemon Pledge, and terribly over-powering chewing gum scents. Lipstick and other makeups back them stank in the heat. Air conditioning was in a few places, like stores and office buildings, but many homes and churches and some schools made do with fans. In the winter, it was even worse, because detergents and fabric softeners and bath soaps and shampoos had pervasive smells that filled clothing and rooms and were extremely distracting. Cars spat smoke back then. You could smell which brand of gasoline an auto was improperly burning because they put scents in the petrol. You could tell which valve needed adjusting on the car because people were notorious for not caring as long as the rust bucket continued to lumber along.

People were already moaning about cheap crap flowing in from the Orient, with electronics and toys from Japan, Thailand, and Korea. There were cheap textiles from Mexico and Brazil. There was even cheap crap made domestically, sewn and molded by real white people. There was coal everywhere. Many public buildings, churches and homes were still heated by coal. Tires were crap, falling apart all over the place with the early radials. Brakes were undependable, with the cars capable of travelling faster with more momentum than the brakes could stop effectively. Couches, chairs and auto interiors were covered with plastic, pvc, to be exact, in order to protect their beauty from hair oils, sweat and food. Entire households smelled like a giant beach ball. Restuarants were filled with the smell of industrial chemicals used to clean the kitchens, mop the floors and polish the counters. The collision of smells from the patrons didn't help, particularly not with the inclusion of tobacco smoke from a dozen brands.

There were a lot more people running around with industrial injuries and damaged ears, eyes and lungs. Safety was not a big issue, yet. For years, I knew people who didn't even know that their cars had safety belts. They'd been tucked down the crevice at the factory and the driver had never thought to look or care. There was noise everwhere. Hearing protection was unheard of outside rifle ranges. And the deaf cranked their radios and TVS and stereos so that every other deafened person in the block would have to crank their's up, too.

There were no personal computers. You had to go down to a university and play with punch cards. Video technology was cumbersome and reel to reel and mostly black and white and rarely seen in the home. If you wanted to watch a movie, you drug out the 8mm or 16mm projector and hung a sheet on the wall. The nice thing about that is that you could watch it backwards, something you can rarely do with DVD or VHS, although I remember doing it with BETA, but that was an access channel machine twenty odd years ago. People seemed to read a lot more back then. They weren't exactly picky about what they read, but even the marginally illiterate and stupid seemed to read newspapers. The news on TV seemed silly, tiny and almost irrelevant, unless somebody had just been shot or something had blowed up.

If you was plucked up from wheres you is now, and plunked down in July, 1966, I promise you, you probably wouldn't want to stay long.

This is 2006, people. Some things are better left alone. Which reminds me. Are the Rolling Stones touring with or without wheelchairs?