Gregory M. Ledet

It’s almost hard to believe it’s been 5 years since my whole world changed.  Around this time 5 years ago, I was writing my name on various body parts with a black Sharpie to make sure that if something happened, I would be easily identifiable.  My fiance had evacuated to Houston and I was left home alone with the cat.  Little did I know that I would lost both the girl and the cat and damn near the house in the weeks to come.  The storm itself changed my life, but like the City of New Orleans, it wasn’t the storm itself but the events after the storm that really fucked me up.

Losing the woman that I loved more than life itself really fucked me up mentally. When we were doing cleanup after the storm and the things that I saw there fucked me up even more.  There’s no need to go into detail about what happened between the woman and I, nor is there any need to relive those images in my mind of the devastation and destruction of the city I love.  What needs to be talked about isn’t the things that happened 5 years ago today, but the things that need to happen to make sure that 5 years from now, the city is better than it was 5 years ago today.

We’ve all heard it on the news… “Louisianians are a very resilient people”.  Well, if we’re so resilient, then why is the city’s population only 60% or so what it was before the storm?  Why are there still parts of the city that look the same way they did 4 years and 11 months ago?  We need to quit looking to the government to fix everything and get off our asses and doing it ourselves.

There’s been a lot of work done since the storm and like I tell a lot of people that ask me about it; if you would have went to New Orleans 6 months after the storm and stayed in the normal tourist areas, you wouldn’t have known that the costliest natural disaster in US history had happened.  Sure, you would have seen some places still boarded up, but for the most part, the city had bounced back.  The outlying areas were still badly messed up, but downtown didn’t look bad.  When I go back home now, we don’t even talk about it.  It’s everywhere else that keeps bringing up bad memories.  Sometimes you just want to forget bad things.

5 years from now the city needs to look like the storm never happened.  It should already be that way, but there’s too much laziness and bullshit going on to have it happen.  The politicians need to get off their asses and get shit done.  The media needs to quit airing specials to dredge up old memories and make it seem like we’re helpless still today.

5 years from now I hope to be back in the city that lives in my heart; back to abnormal.  5 years ago today was the beginning of the worst time in my life; oh, and a Hurricane hit New Orleans.

*edit*

It’s now 4:30 in the morning and I haven’t slept all night.  I started to go to sleep earlier, but all the crap on the TV the past few days about the storm have brought up some really painful memories and that’s not very conducive to sleep.  I know people that lost everything they own in the storm.  I saw their homes… covered in mold with a waterline that is 3 feet high in the attic.  While I didn’t lose the possessions that these people did, I lost a lot.  I lost Sarah who meant the world to me.  I lost many friends because I lost my mind after the storm.  I attempted suicide over this crap and ended up in the hospital for a couple of weeks.  I was found to be bipolar and having PTSD.  I even lost my freedom for a short time.

The weeks and months after the storm were hard on a lot of people.  The depression rate sky rocketed, as did alcohol and drug abuse.  We didn’t know what else to do.  You would walk around town and see people with their heads down, just shaking them back and forth… lost.  In typical New Orleans fashion, we tried to make fun of the situation.  I remember seeing a refrigerator on the side of the road and someone had written on it “Do not open, FEMA inspector inside”.  The comedians from NOLA were doing gigs around Houston and Atlanta and doing Katrina material already.  Down in my hometown of Houma, things weren’t as bad.  We had some wind damage and a bunch of rain, but nothing horrible; I guess you can say we were lucky.

I remember growing up and listening to my mom talk about Betsy and Camille constantly.  Never in a million years did I think that I was going to have a story for my kids that would rival, and in many cases beat, the stories my mom told me.  Then again, never in a million years did I think that I was going to go through the worst natural disaster in US recorded history and live to talk about it.

August 29th will always be a day that I will never forget.  9/11 has been drilled into us by the media for 9 years now, but the only thing that had to drill Katrina into my head was being outside in the storm, facing 120+ MPH winds.  I didn’t need CNN to tell me how bad it was in New Orleans… I lived it.  I don’t need Anderson Cooper set up on a street corner in the 9th ward every year “celebrating” something that devastated the lives of so many.  All I need to do is go to sleep at night and the visions of the destruction are there like it happened only yesterday.

When people find out that I’m from New Orleans, I get the same questions all the time. “Were you there for Katrina?” “Was it as bad as they say it was?” etc, etc, etc.  It’s always the same shit, and to be honest, I’m tired of hearing it.  I’m still trying to get over that time in my life and the last thing I need is some moron sitting in front of be and bringing up bad memories.  Sometimes I don’t mind it.  Like today, someone IM’d me because they saw some posts I had made in a Fark thread during Katrina.  They wanted to find out if I was still alive!  It was actually kinda nice to be able to sit there and spill my guts to a total stranger over what happened in my life back then; even the Hep C stuff.  She sat there on the other end of the computer and asked questions to which I replied.  I divulged info that I normally don’t, but it was comforting to know that even a total stranger out there cares.  And it’s not that the stranger cares about me personally, they care about New Orleans and the people that went through hell on earth.  That’s what’s comforting; to know that there are people in this world that still give a damn about his or her fellow man.

I hear all the time from people saying that they should have never rebuilt New Orleans. “It’s too far below sea level” and “it’s just going to get destroyed again” are just some of the shit that I hear spill out of these idiots’ mouths.  I even heard “you should never build a city that close to the mouth of a river!”  What about New York?  Alexandria in Egypt? Hell, ANY MAJOR PORT ON EARTH!  Without New Orleans, we’d all be drinking tea and singing “God Save the Queen” right now.  Where else on Earth can you go and get the culture, food or people that you have in New Orleans?  Where else on Earth would people move back to knowing that it was prone to disaster again and again?  Hell, I’ve met tons of people that had never been there before the storm but came down after-wards to help and they’ve never left!  The City has that effect on people.  Either you love it or you hate it, either way it’s going to create strong emotions in you.  I love New Orleans with all that I am and it will always be “home” to me.  I don’t care where I live or how long I live there, I will always think of it as temporary until I get back to New Orleans.  I will always talk about going “home” for vacation and I will always try to talk people into coming with me.

The people of New Orleans need tourist.  Like a needle needs a vein, like a preacher need pain; NOLA need tourism.  It’s the blood that pumps through the city, albeit with a high blood alcohol level.  The American people should not be writing New Orleans off like I’ve heard so many times being done.  The City wants you and it doesn’t care who you are or where you’re from.  They say that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas… well what happens in New Orleans is something that you’re going to want to tell everyone.  But start with your priest, because there’s going to be some sins that you need to confess.

Man, my knee is killing me right now.  I know it’s been a few months since my last update, but I’ve been a busy bee for a while now.  Let me fill you guys in on the past couple months, then I’ll explain the title of this post.

I finished up with my little contract that I was on at the beginning of July.  I had a good time working at Express and I wish those guys the best with their new network.  As a consultant, all good things must come to an end, but with every ending is a new beginning.  Before I had even left Express I had started the interview process with a new company.  They have a VERY thorough interview process and after 3 separate interviews, one of which was me being vetted by an engineer that actually works for Juniper Networks, they decided that I was the guy they were looking for.  So, I’ll be starting a new job on August 16th!

Now, for the whole “OUCH!” thing.  This past weekend was the Dublin Irish Fest in Dublin, OH.  The Irish Fest is always a great time.  Last year I worked the Utilikilts booth out there and had a blast.  I picked up Stewart from UK at the airport on Thursday and we went out that night, helped setup on Friday and worked all day Friday, then returned on Saturday to work.  I could have went back on Sunday, but I couldn’t walk then.  This year I had volunteered, but they already had a full crew.  Well, my father-in-law, his girlfriend, my wife and myself all went down on Saturday to take in the festival.  The UK booth was right at the entrance that we walked in, so I immediately stopped by (in my Utilikilt, none the less) to say Hi to the guys that were working (I had worked with 2 of them last year).  Well, the 2 guys that had volunteered this year decided to bail and Douglas and Ken were alone, so I stepped in to give them a hand.  Big mistake on Greg’s part.

As you may know, I’m a bit of a desk jockey.  I’m not used to spending all day on my feet, much less while wearing combat boots and thick wool socks.  I stood up without sitting at all from 11AM until about 10PM.  By the time I got home and took off my boots, my ankles had swollen to the point of actually breaking the leather of my boots and my legs had swollen to about an inch bigger around on top of my socks than below them.  I had trouble making it up the stairs.

Because I was walking gingerly up the stairs to protect my feet, I didn’t realize just how bad my knees were.  On the way down the stairs this morning, my left knee gave out and I took a nice tumble down the stairs.  I’d be willing to bet that I’ve stretched out the MCL on my left knee.  I don’t think I’ll be working any festivals again for a while…

If you’re reading this blog, it’s likely because you are a friend of mine; and if you’re a friend of mine, then you know by now that really weird shit has a tendency of happening to me.  You also know by all the stories that I tell (and I do go on, at length, about them) that some very interesting thing has happened to me in my life.  Well, this morning, the most interesting thing to happen to me so far this year occurred.

I finished up with my allotted work early so I cut out of work about 4:45am and was on my way home.  I stopped off in Dublin, OH to grab a bottle of water because I was a little parched.  I pulled up to a pump, jumped out the car and ran inside.  On the way out with a Krispy Kreme in one hand and a bottle of water in the other, I notice that the Transformer Bumblebee had pulled in behind me (a bright yellow Camaro, in case you haven’t seen the movie).  As I’m walking up to my car I notice 2 things that stick out at me.

#1. The license plate on the car reads PMOY
#2. The woman getting out of the car is roughly 6′ tall, blonde, leggy, and drop dead gorgeous.

What Bumblebee and a Playmate of the Year may look like

About this time the little devil and angel pop up on my shoulders.  The devil tells me “Dude, you need to say something. She could be an actual Playmate of the Year!” and the angel says “Greg, just keep your mouth shut and get in the fucking car”.  Of course, the angel is always on my left shoulder and I have an 80% hearing loss in that ear.

Me: “So, is PMOY an actual title or just an aspiration?”
Her: *smile* “You get a +1 for the awesome fedora, but a -1 for a douchey pick up line”
Me: “Well, you get a +1 for being drop dead gorgeous, but a -2 for being a frigid bitch”

At this point she starts laughing heartily. I walk towards the back of my car to where she’s pumping gas and she says:

Her: “You’re pretty quick.”
Me: “I’m a comedian, it’s my job.”
Her: “It’s actually a funny thing about the license plate. I bought the car 4 months ago and within the first 2 weeks of buying it, I got pulled over for speeding 4 times.  I thought about what personalized plates I wanted to put on my car and the first thing that came to mind was ‘Pull Me Over Yellow’. The Playmate of the Year thing never entered my mind at the time”

I went on to explain that I had a yellow Dodge SRT-4 that I had named Amy, after Arrest Me Yellow.  We went on to have a nice little conversation while she finished filling up her car ($47!) and I hopped in my beat up piece of shit and continued home.

I know it doesn’t seem like it was very interesting to the outside person, but you have to remember that it’s been a VERY slow year for Greg Ledet. Up until 3 weeks ago I was on that fucking therapy that kept me locked up the whole time and nothing interesting ever happens in Bellefontaine, Ohio.

Now that I’m off the treatment, I’ll be moving the feeling of this blog back to a basic journal of my life.  The drugs have started to fade and I’m starting to regain full control of my facilities (ie, I’m getting back to being hypomanic), so hopefully I’ll start getting back to doing the crazy shit that makes my life interesting, like staring down category 3 hurricanes while completely shitfaced.

-Greg

I’ve been thinking about this for a while now.  As a huge fan of science and technology, as well as the space program, I think I’m going to get a tattoo commemorating the Space Shuttle program.  I’ve talked to a few people about it and I’ve gotten some weird comments.  One person wanted to know why the Shuttle and not Apollo or even Mercury.  That’s actually pretty simple for me.  The Shuttle program is what I know.  It’s been the manned space program for the vast majority of my life.  I was born in November of 1976 and the first test flights of the Shuttle started in February of 1977.  This has been the only space program my generation has known.

The shuttle program first launched on April 12, 1981 with Columbia and STS-1.  I was 4 years old at the time of the first launch.  I still remember very vividly the Challenger disaster in 1986 (STS-51-L) and thinking at the time that man would never go to space again.  I didn’t know about Apollo 1 at the time… hell I had just turned 9 years old a couple of months before.

I was glued to the TV on February 1, 2003 when Columbia and the crew of STS-107 burned up upon reentry.  I had tears in my eyes for those 7 people and their families.  I knew that they shuttle would fly again, seeing as I had already experienced the Challenger disaster, but little did I know that it would cause NASA to scrap the program in 2010 in favor of Orion.

The Space Shuttle has been a huge part of all of our lives.  The launch of Hubble during STS-31 and the subsequent servicing missions concluding with STS-125 have benefited all of humanity.  I am so jealous of John Grunsfeld and Megan McArthur for being the final 2 people to touch Hubble.  That one scientific instrument has taught us more about the cosmos than anything else in history.  Hubble is just 6 of the total of 134 Shuttle missions.

So, in memory of the Shuttle program, I think I’m going to get a tattoo of STS-133′s mission patch.  STS-133 is going to be the final flight of the Space Shuttle (STS-134 will actually fly before STS-133) and with it, it’ll be the end of an era.  I don’t think that NASA has picked the final mission patch, but I do know that they were down to 15 finalist back in January.  I have seen those 15 finalist and they were all cool and something I wouldn’t mind having on my body forever.

Another idea was to get the Shuttle Program patch tattooed on me.  I have nothing on the right side of my chest, and that’s where the mission patch is located on the astronaut’s suits, so that’s where I’ll likely get something.  I need to get something to remember the 14 people that lost their lives trying to improve our knowledge of the cosmos.  I need to get something to commemorate all of the astronauts that have flown into space aboard the Shuttle and the countless support people on the ground that have made the program possible.

Sure, to some people the Shuttle will just be another craft in the list that went to space, but to me it’s something different. Mercury got into space, Apollo got us to the Moon, but the Shuttle has taught us more than we could have ever imagined.  Because of that, I owe it to every astronaut, engineer, and even janitor that has been a part of the Shuttle Program to carry forward what they have done for all of humanity and to get something permanent that will stay with me forever.

EDIT

I was just informed that they chose the final mission patch for STS-133, and it just so happens to be the one I really liked.  This will be my new tattoo.

I just read an article on Discovery.com about some people out there thinking the movie “Avatar” is racist. I believe it started with an article on Essence.com.  I’m sorry, but this is just stupid.  When are people going to stop looking for racial subtexts in everything?  They are saying that because the movie involves a white man that saves the “colored” natives, that it’s racist.  James Cameron said in an e-mail to The Associated Press that his film “asks us to open our eyes and truly see others, respecting them even though they are different, in the hope that we may find a way to prevent conflict and live more harmoniously on this world. I hardly think that is a racist message.”

It isn’t racist.  The only thing that’s racist about this whole thing is the racist assholes who see it as racist because they can’t look beyond anything else.  Annalee Newitz, who is editor for io9.com, has opened her mouth and came out to say “When will whites stop making these movies and start thinking about race in a new way?”  Keep in mind that Annalee is white.  She has also written a book called “White Trash: Race and Class in America”.  Would someone like to explain to me what a lesbian Jew who grew up in California knows about race and racism?  Antisemitism?  Sure I’ll give her that.  Homophobia? She gets that too.  Racism?  I think not…

Now, back on subject.  I’m getting tired of all these people out there that want to say everything is racist.  A white man can’t do anything in this day and age without being labeled a racist.  I remember back before the Presidential election I was having a conversation with a woman in line at Walmart and the subject of the election came up.  When I stated that I was voting for McCain, she immediately stopped talking to me.  On my way to the car, the woman passed me in her SUV, rolled down the window, and shouted “RACIST” out the window at me before driving away.  I was labeled a racist because of my vote.  She never asked “why” I was voting for McCain, or what it was about Obama that I didn’t like, she just assumed that because I was white and I wasn’t voting for the black guy, I must be racist.

I’m not one of those people that have a lot of “white guilt”.  In fact, I don’t have any “white guilt”.  I never owned slaves.  My parents didn’t either.  Neither did my grandparents, their parents, or their parents.  No one that is reading this was ever a slave.  Neither were your parents or your grand parents.  It’s time to get over this bullshit people.  We are HUMAN BEINGS.  Sure, we have out differences and sure, we say mean things about others at times, but why does it have to do with race?  If I said “you know, Joe is a thief” and Joe was white, it would be fine.  If Joe was black, I’d be making some sort of racist comment.

Over the weekend it came out that Harry Reid (D – Nevada), our Senate Majority Leader, said of then-candidate Obama that he “believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama — a ‘light-skinned’ African American with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one”.  HOLY SHIT!  The best part about it?  Because he’s a liberal, no one cared.  The Congressional Black Caucus laughed it off.  If Mitch McConnell had said that, they would be asking not just for his resignation, but his head on a spike.

I don’t believe in these double standards, and I don’t believe that everything is racist.  Hell, I bet some of you are reading this and thinking “Wow, Greg’s a racist!”.  Well, I’m not.  I’m human, and I don’t have to sit here and prove to you just how not-racist I am.  Yes, there’s tons of racism in America today, but I want someone to admit that it goes both ways.  Last year, 12 people were arrested in Lafourche Parish, Louisiana in connection with hate crimes that were committed in the local jail.  These were black men committing a hate crime against white men.  Around the same time, 2 white men in the neighboring Louisiana Parish (Terrebonne) had hate-crime charges against them resuscitated following pressure from the local NAACP.  They had the charges dropped because the defendant didn’t show up in court for the trial, so the prosecution had no witness.  But because the NAACP started shit, they DA filed the charges again, the case went to court, and they were found guilty.  But that wasn’t good enough.  Civil-rights groups protested because they said the judge was too lenient in his sentencing.  That’s not why I brought this up though.  The Southern Poverty Law Center keeps track of all hate incidents in the US.  They didn’t post anything on the one about the 12 people arrested in Lafourche Parish, but gave the Terrebonne Parish case tons of publicity.  I know they knew about the Lafourche parish case too, because I brought it to their attention on more than one occasion.  The SPLC’s reply?  There’s no such thing as a hate crime perpetrated by a black person against a white person.  Ain’t that some shit?  Oh, and don’t get me started on Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the Harvard professor that cried foul after he was arrested for suspicious behavior…

People, we’re all human beings.  We all bleed red and we all die one day.  Let’s get past this whole skin color issue and move on to more important things.  There is way too much time and effort wasted on stupidity here.

Look people, I don’t give a shit if you don’t like my writing style.  It’s intentionally harsh, like life.  Don’t go off on other websites or send me stupid emails telling me that I “don’t need to use that kind of language” or tell me that I’m “not in the least bit funny and frankly, it’s quite depressing” to read my posts.  I’m not writing this blog for you.  I’m writing this blog for ME.  You get that through you thick fucking skulls you insolent pieces of reptilian shit.  I’m an asshole.  I always have been, I always will be, and I never have, nor never will, give a flying fuck about your feelings or what you think.  I would rather shave off my eyelids with a rusted butter knife than read the fucking email or comment you felt was your moral duty to send to me.  Do us all a favor and shove a double barrel 12 gauge in your mouth and taste the sweet, sweet release that is 00 buckshot.

I get sick and fucking tired of people who think they are better than me.  You think you’re better than me?  Fuck you!  You think that for some reason I’m shouldn’t feel the way I feel or say the things I say?  Suck my cock!  I’m rough around the edges, I’m got a bad personality, and as Popeye says, I am what I am and that’s all that I am.  Do you think that I’m going to change who I am because I got an email from someone who has nothing better to do in life than send an email to someone that you barely know telling them that they are depressing them with their blog posts?  Jesus H. Christ, get a life people.  I’ve been like this since birth.  I’ve lost relationships, friendships, jobs, houses, and family because of who I am.  I haven’t changed yet and I’m sure as fuck not going to change now.

See, I have this thing called “principle”.  I stand by that principle.  If you don’t like me, then there’s something wrong with you, not me.  Sure, it’s been a hard road.  It sucks not being able to pick up the phone and talk to my mother.  It’s horrible that I have very few close friends because when someone really gets to know me they normally run the other way.  Yes, I am crazy.  Yes, I’m an asshole.  I like who I am.  I’m a 33 year old man who acts like a 15 year old kid and I enjoy every minute of it.  Maybe if you relaxed a little bit and lived life to the fullest you wouldn’t be walking around with that stick shoved up your ass.

edit

Wow… I just reread this. I really need to lay off the “milk plus”.

I’m sitting here watching meaningless crap on TV thinking about my childhood. I remember growing up listening to adults go on and on about how hard they had it when they were growing up.  About how they had to walk to school 25 miles, up hill, BOTH WAYS, just to get an education and then rather than going home, they had to go to their full time job at the filling station to check people’s oil and top off their tanks until midnight when they could finally go home to do their homework for two hours before waking up at 5am to cook breakfast for their younger siblings.  I remember thinking about how much bullshit that was, knowing that I grew up in South Louisiana and that the closest hill of any height was in Tennessee.  I remember listening to my mother and father give me diatribes about how bad Hurricane Betsy and Hurricane Camille were and how my uncle Keith got caught out in the eye of Betsy and almost didn’t make it back in.  I remember thinking to myself back then “there’s no way in hell I’ll ever put the younger generation through this when I grow up.”  That was before I took a long, hard look at the kids of today.

I can’t help but notice how the kids of today have so fucking easy!  Shit, compared to how I grew up, these fucking snot nosed brats live in a Utopia.  They have no idea how good they’ve got it!  Hell, when I was a kid, we didn’t have any fucking Internet.  There was no Google.  We had this thing called a library and this big box called a “card catalog”.  We had to master the Dewey Decimal System if we wanted to know something.  These fucking punks don’t even know who Dewey was!  And email or IM?  HA!  If we wanted to send a message to someone we grabbed a #2 pencil, and envelope and a stamp.  Then we had to get off our asses and walk to the mailbox to put it in; and we were lucky if it got there by the end of the week.

We didn’t have any Playstation 3 with HD graphics that ran off easy to clean BluRay Discs.  We had a fucking Atari 2600 that ran cartridges that collected dust faster than we could collect baseball cards.  When they got filled with crap, we blew on them with our MOUTHS for fucks sake.  We had games like Space Invaders and Pong.  The boxes that our games came in looked like this:

but the game itself looked like this:

And there were no multiple levels or bullshit like that.  There was one level.  It got faster and harder until you fucking died.  You couldn’t win.  There was no “win” in gaming.  You got your ass handed to you by a fucking box that actually had dip switches in it.

When I was a kid, there were no MP3′s or Bittorrent.  If you wanted to steal music, you had to copy your friend tapes or go to the music shop and shove those cassettes down the front of your pants, hoping like hell that mall security didn’t catch you before you could get back to the bike rack and make a break for it.  Either that or you had to record off of the radio where, invariably, the DJ would talk over the beginning of it and fuck it all up.  I waited all day for that fucking song to come on and this twatwaffle had to fuck it all up and you just knew that they weren’t going to play it again until the Top 20 request show at 10pm.  We made mix tapes and gave them to girls hoping that the lyrics of the songs would profess our undying love for them.  I made stacks and stacks of these fucking things, taking days at a time out of my life to carefully select the proper mix of music, only to hope that the pretty girl down the street would translate the lyrics of L.L. Cool J’s “I Need Love” into letting me touch her boob or that Barbara Weathers’ delicious lead vocal to Atlantic Starr’s “Secret Lovers” was my way of saying that nobody had to know.

We didn’t text our friends; we passed notes in class.  We didn’t have house parties and brand new cars; we had bicycles and the skating rink or the mall.  We didn’t have internet porn; we had to bribe that homeless guy that slept behind the Time-Saver to buy you a copy of Penthouse; or we had to jack-off to the underwear section of the Sears catalog.  In our porn, there weren’t any Barbie-doll hotties with fake boobs and spray-on tans.  We had someone that looked liked your friend’s hot mom, and she had Buckwheat in a leg choke.  And MTV had fucking MUSIC ON TV!  Wow!  What a concept!

We didn’t have CGI, we had shitty miniature models that George Lucas ran down a string, AND IT LOOKED GOOD.  15 year old kids didn’t look like Miley Cyrus and Zac Efron, they looked like Screech and Pedro from Napoleon Dynamite.  We didn’t bitch about who our president was… RONALD REGAN WAS A FUCKING GOD!

Sure, there was cable television, but it was like 17 channels and there was no on-screen guide.  You had to look in this little book called the “TV Guide” to see what was coming on.  And a remote control?  Shit… that was for rich people.  YOU were what your dad would call the “remote control”.

When I was a kid, there was no “Cartoon Network”.  Cartoons came on one day a week… Saturday mornings.  WE HAD TO WAIT ALL WEEK, you little spoiled shits.  The only thing that we had that was “on demand” was when your dad told you to get off your ass and go get him a beer out the fridge.  We didn’t have cell phones, you had to wait until your mom got off the phone with your grandmother to be able to call your friends.  And if someone else called while you were on the phone, they got this thing called a busy signal.  There was no voice mail…

You know Mom and Dad, I kinda see where you are coming from now.  I know I’m only 33, and sure, we have Hurricane Katrina and 9-11 to your Hurricane Camille and Vietnam, but I really do see where you were coming from.  These fucking kids today have no idea how easy they have it.  You take away their XBox 360 and they want run away from home and commit suicide.  You threaten to ground them for a week and the next thing you know they are on the phone with the ACLU trying to file a civil rights lawsuit.  Maybe these little brats do need a good ass whooping.  I guess it worked for me.

We didn’t have instant access to a treasure trove of various foodstuffs that mom would pick up at the market.  If you got the munchies from smoking too much pot, you actually had to make something.  And when dinner time came along, you ate what mom made for dinner or you went to bed hungry.  That’s the way we lived, AND WE LIKED IT.

I swear, these little fuckers wouldn’t last a day back in 1987.