My Nostalgia Is Acting Up

Eminem defies NFL and kneels in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick during Super Bowl halftime show https://t.co/XDI07ULqDk

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) February 14, 2022

They told Slim Shady to please stand up, but Slim Shady said God sent him to piss the world off.

There was a lot of commentary on Twitter about how this half-time show was about my generation, and frankly, we never did say we were going to die before we got old. We said don't you forget about me. And we are getting old, and I wish more of us were getting wise. 

The fucking kids aren't all right. Charlie Kirk thinks the half-time show was full of sexual anarchy. This dumb man-baby must have been peeing in his diapers through the Janet Jackson and Prince half-time shows. He literally comes off like John Lithgow's character in Footloose.  That's two Footloose references I've made this month. I may be getting old. I repeat myself. Matt Walsh, middle aged but younger than me, doesn't know "woke" means aware, and Marshall Mathers is aware he's a white guy who owes a fuckton to Black music and Black people. That he's supposedly making amends for anything else is Walsh's own bullshit. 

I'm glad the convoy asshats didn't come to LA to fuck with the Super Bowl despite what loons like Wendy Rogers and Senator Rand Paul wanted. That would have been a shitshow--all those Confederate flags in LA. I don't think those two remember how things could go, because they forget that urban America is also real America. They think it would scare the shit out of people who live in the cities that right-wing dumbasses think have been burned down by BLM. They forget riots that have happened not even thirty years ago. 

I don't, The truckers don't, either, and they probably know that unlike Ottawa or Windsor, if you go to LA or NY or Philadelphia, you might meet with an entirely different atmosphere that isn't going to wait for police action because nope. Residents will find a way. People have turned out en masse for deceased kids they didn't even know, and some jackasses want to disrupt the shelves at Acme and whether our own kids get fed--are you for real? 

Anyway, in other news, Ivan Reitman, who directed Animal House and Ghostbusters and Stripes, and a lot of my other cultural touchstones, passed just now, and thinking about his movies' influences on me is just a lot. Meatballs! Twins!  So much oddballs bucking the system. So much inspired losers finally winning. Just a director of heart and humor. 

I am deep in my feels, as the kids say. Even my teenage Cold War senses are engaged. My awareness of fear about being queer and female.  My fear that society is being ruled by lame-ass sellouts and commodifiers, shitheads who put a price-tag on everything even if it is fake. My lifelong worry that the stupid will overcome people with sense by sheer numbers. 

Some people have pleasant nostalgia, and I don't. I mean, sometimes the music is banging. But I've tried to live in the future for a change of pace and keep finding dystopias. We still have folks who don't and won't learn from history, except for finding newer, dumber ways to repeat it. And I guess my nostalgia is keeping me young because I haven't rebelled against all the fuckshit just yet if stupid people just keep making more. 

So here I go again on my own, etc. Going down the only road I've ever known. Like a drifter.... I guess what I'm saying is--nostalgia is a reminder you were young, once and greeted the fuckery with a fresh face. So freshen up, motherfuckers, because here comes a new load of fuckery. Made fresh daily. With mourning and reminders that your knees aren't right and your heart goes off weird when you stress it out. And your heroes sucked or are dead and you will eventually hate things you once loved because everything is a little stupid. 

But you can always love the underdog or want to punch Nazis, and I guess that is something. You can always choose to be weird and free and say your amends when it's time and be a mensch. You can rock and roll and ball it out and tell the world I am here and weird and fucked up and I would still never think it was my godgiven right to blow COVID into anyone's face like it was my birthright and fuck people who would do domestic terrorism because they don't want a wee ouchie in their wee widdle awm. 

In a world where we got chickenpox and people got shingles because they had the chickenpox, and we learned that mono led to chronic fatigue and MS? Oh, no. We lived through history to learn from this. We remember the fight to not treat HIV poz people as disposable. Disease and disability do not conspire to make people less than--other people do. And yet the unvaxxed choose their less employable or preferable state--and not because they have better science, but because they are mad for other assorted things. Or else the choice to vax would be easy. 

I don't recall this level of misinformation in my misty-eyed remembrance of yesteryear. But I am sure the stupid isn't even new, just worsened by social media and weaponized by profit somewhere along the line. 

I might listen to some old time rock and roll and then fuck off to bed. Or maybe I will stay up late because I can, at my age.