The High Wire Act of Life

When I’m not Netflixing and chilling with my bae, I’m staying on fleek while getting turnt at my favorite drinking establishment with my mains, because, after all, YOLO. Am I right? And it’s pretty remarkable I do all that shit considering I come from a generation conceived and born way back when humping wasn’t called twerking. And it sure as shit wasn’t done on stage by a former Disney nymph under the guise of “dancing.” And thank god for that! The very idea of my generation’s Disney wet dream, voluptuous Mouseketeer Annette Funicello, twerking makes my once vibrant crotchal area tingle. Imagine what it would have done to me when I was heavily into puberty!

When I’m talking about my generation, I’m referring to the Baby Boomers—so-called because our parents liked to screw, the pill hadn’t been invented yet, condoms were made of tissue paper and abortions were done in dark alleys by men with wire coat hangers who may or may not have passed biology in junior high. And all that screwing and lack of birth control added up to a boom of babies being popped out after our horny dads returned home from World War II to our fertile moms.

Yes, there were a load of us, and thanks to modern medicine, we’re hanging around a bit longer than our folks did, which is good for us and bad for our offspring who’ll have to clean up the mess when we start shitting our pants. They call that the Circle of Life—going from diaper filler to diaper changer to diaper filler again.

But back when we had better control of our bodily functions, we Baby Boomers, like our parents, enjoyed screwing. In fact we loved to screw… a lot! The difference was, we weren’t ashamed of our obsession with inserting flap A into slot B and we let the world know it. The Summer of Love, baby!!! But unlike our parents, we had the miracle of the birth control pill; we had stronger condoms; and we had legalized abortion.

In addition to screwing, we also loved drinking booze and smoking dope and snorting coke and tripping on acid, so simple tasks like remembering to take a pill that wasn’t an upper or a downer, picking up rubbers at the drug store, or saving enough coin for an abortion were major challenges for our damaged brain cells. So despite having birth control advantages our parents never had, we begat the next generation of spoiled brats as if we thought the misery of childrearing we had put our parents through ended with us.

Those spoiled brats we popped out are called Generation X because apparently an alarming number of them don’t know how to sign their own names. But they sure do know how to screw and drink and smoke and snort, because if there’s one thing our kids learned from us, it’s how to screw, drink, smoke and snort. So now they have given the planet an entire new generation of humans called Millennials—a name derived from, I think, a flower, or something like that.

The best thing that can be said about Millennials is that they are Generation X’s problem. As grandparents, we get to help turn them into overly-adored, spoiled rug rats by buying them toys they don’t need and filling them up with junk they shouldn’t eat before sending them home. But eventually it’s mom and dad (or mom and mom, or dad and dad) who will have to deal with teens influenced by a culture far more addictive (modern technology, social networking, internet porn), far more violent (school shootings, terrorism, Black Friday shopping at Wal-Mart), and far less intelligent (the Kardashians, Duck Dynasty, the Republican Party) than we had to deal with, which was way worse than what we put our parents through.

That’s the way it works, folks; the Circle of Life is actually a continuous high wire act that becomes more populous and more perilous as each new generation hops on. And when our grandkids become old enough to screw and drink and smoke and snort, they will spawn a whole new generation with a whole new name and a whole new set of problems to be unleashed upon mankind.

And on and on the high wire act will go. That is until the polar icecaps melt and the oceans rise, turning our planet into a giant waterpark.

So there’s always that.