Condensed Retrospect

Well, everyone else is doing it so why not I? I got this idea from Suldog, who got it from Buck, who might have gotten it from someone else but I'm not sure.It is a sort of condensed retrospective of a person's life based on decades. So this should be a short post to trudge through. And so this post begins with a song.

I'm not sure why we begin these posts with a song. I'm not sure if it is suppose to be a song that most shaped your life, or a song from that decade. This one popped into my head while I was debating whether or not I was going to make a post. So it is the one I am using. This is the band Boston, and the name of the song is "More Than A Feeling." (Stupid YouTube has some type of comment box at the top. Don't click on the little reroute button you see. You have to push the little "x" located at the top to close the comment box.)

So time began for me in the late 1970's, specifically, 1975. Not sure when this photo was taken. But I'm sure it was before the second grade in elementary school, because I had eyeglasses by the 3rd grade. Times back then always reminded me of the "Richard Simmons Era." We all wore the Richard Simmons gym shorts and t-shirts to work out to, or just to wear all the time (even to the grocery store). The Brady Bunch was a sitcom of that time along with I Dream Of Jeanine, The Honeymooners, and All In The Family. Not much blipped into my radar to make any significant comment about.

And here comes the 1980's. Bellbottoms had gone the way of the dodo bird. Roller skating parties were still around, but was fast becoming a vanishing trend. I most remember the dawning of two things: The Simpsons, and MTV. A thing called grunge was the new "in" thang. And slang was developing as a second language, to the horror of most parents. School was a place to go to shake up the routine of being at home and doing chores.

I liked going to baseball games, but enjoyed watching hockey more. Life consisted of baked pretzels in the oven, fried donuts in the fryer, and burgers on the grill. My brother and I would climb onto the shed roof to watch the neighbors' fantastic firework displays for the Fourth of July. We swam in the pool during the day, and played flashlight tag at night during the Indian Summer moon.

Now let's move to the 1990's.

The 1990's were... strange. I remember the uproar at my school about the black Bart Simpson t-shirts that some students were wearing, which was against school policy to wear ANYTHING with a logo. This sparked a protest and sit-in by students over racism. I watched most of the school funding go toward building an all new teacher lounge, courtyard and exterior facelift to the school while English teachers struggled to have meaningful classes with absolutely no textbooks for students (for that matter, most of the school subjects that teachers taught there from old textbooks or no textbooks. For health class, there was no CLASSROOM. We had classes for that on the auditorium stage.)

I graduated that year, but before graduation we -as a nation- were about to be involved with the Gulf War. I remember watching the news reports during my competition practice at the Vo-tech. I realized then as I know now that this wasn't a war to help an invaded nation. It was a war to protect our oil interests.

And now, we have reached 2000, where I had taken care of my brother's (and sister's) children as they bettered their lives in the beginning of this decade, and I switched to making my own choices and living my life in the later part of it, or at least in the 2010-2012 time period. And this is the time when The Overlord made her arrival.

And that is that. I'm writing, and raising my beautiful daughter.