Times are grim and the world’s gone sour. Between its insatiable hunger for money, the soft pampered entitlement of rotten spoiled shitlets who never learned a hard day’s work, and the inconvenience of every damn little hiccup feeling like a punch to the gut, this place isn’t much fun anymore and the majority of folks… They suck.
Why’s this world gone so rotten, crooked, and greedy? It’s absolutely disgusting. Here, I’ll show you the dirt:
- GIJoes… back in the day, $2.50 got you the whole package; the hero (or villain,) a plastic base to keep ’em steady, a pack loaded with gear—disguise masks, ninja steel, shotguns, holsters, and enough rubber tubing to tie a knot. They came armed to the teeth with artillery and blades. Some setups had skis or ATVs, some came with critters ranging from eagles to sting rays. And if you dropped twelve bucks on the deluxe set you’d get a helicopter or an apocalyptic chopshop hotrod that had twice the hardware and a dossier on every action figure’s dark past.
Today, the same four-inch G.I. Joe; same cheap plastic, same stiff joints, same cheap paint, and one lousy toy gun sets you back twenty-four bucks… for what amounts in plastic to one recycled milk jug. It don’t add up. They cost even less to make today than they did in the ’80s.
- A ragtag squad of green plastic army men; stiff, lifeless, mundane and cheap as dirt at ninety-nine per centum ( a bag of one hundred.) A bargain, really, considering the way they went out: swallowed by the weeds, scorched by the sun, chewed up by a hound, or sucked into a vacuum. Some were buried in the sand, forgotten, while others just drifted through a junk shop bag, ghosts of a toy chest long since gone cold.
Today for a pack of forty you’re gonna pay twenty bucks… not that many folks are buying those little green soldiers, at least not anyone in my sphere of consumerism, but still…
- The assorted bag of yellow and red cowboys and indians that came with a few broncos you could mount some to. A bag of a dozen cost a dollar and just like the army men that dwindled away over the course of a week, usually on long road trips with the family.
If I’m playing detective, I’d bet half the rot in today’s world and the latest breed along with the millennials that spawned them comes from not being yanked off the titty until their preteens…it’s a long damn time to be sucklin’ the nipple. Then there was all that colorful, dainty nursery trash—Barney, the Power Rangers, Pokemon, the Teletubbies, Pogs; it turned their brains to mush, leaving ’em soft as wet paper. The rot may have started there, sure, but it spread like syphilis on the playgrounds.
Back in Gen X’s day, the playground was a setup. Our swings were nothing but bald tractor tires, wire teeth waiting to tear your skin to ribbons. We had Jungle Gyms towering fifteen feet over a gravel blacktop that had all the bounce of a slab of concrete. On a sweltering afternoon those tar fumes would hit you like a huff of lead paint making your head spin until someone inevitably took a dive. Most of the tunnels were fiberglass, leaving you itchin’ like you’d been wrapped in a polyester onesie for the rest of the damn day.
Two wheels… you strapped on a helmet or some pads and you were practically begging for a beating, and most days, the street delivered. You’d be the schoolyard joke, the punchline in every alley. There were no bike lanes back then. You stayed out of the road to avoid your mamma’s switch and to prevent meeting another grizzled blue-collar stiff who’d slammed his brakes to keep from clippin’ you, hopped out of his rig and screamed about how your parents were raising a fucking idiot.
Slides… back when we were small fry, those things were twenty-foot monsters of polished industrial steel and chrome. You’d take a ride down that devil after it’d been soaking up the sun all day, wearing nothing but shorts. By the time you hit the bottom, the skin on your legs felt like molten glass, stinging like a grudge that wouldn’t die.
