my careless contagion

By no means am I old but sometimes feel that way. I'm not on any medications. Am fairly active. God blessed me with good health. Still, I've been around a while and sometimes feel the weight of that. Here follow some things that painfully point out the fact that I've been on this planet a while. In case you wonder just how long, most would say I'm from Generation X. You know, the ones who grew up feral. If some of this sounds familiar, as if I've already talked about it, well, that makes sense. That happens when you get older. Grab a hot chocolate and pull up a chair. Let's get it on.  1. Young people. They have a lot of confidence that comes chiefly from being young. Just wait until the world makes you cry until you realize you know absolutely nothing, then get back to me. That's not bitterness speaking. But you don't know what's holding the world up until you realize it's certainly not you. Younger people have different expectations and don...

This is one of my favorite things. I enjoy looking back at how awesome and wonderful and sometimes detestable our popular culture was. Care to follow along? Don't care? Okay, square. You can stay home and miss all the fun. Relax with a dizzying dazzle of towels after a hot shower and jump into an even more horrifying bed of patterns guaranteed to make your eyes hurt.  I know this is hard to read, but I have a point to make. Everything in the 70s had a pattern! Even toilet paper! Everything was colorful. And, often, the colors matched everything around it (a design faux pas now). In an era when everything is stainless steel, black, or white, it may seem strange. But it was glorious. For the record, my personal design philosophy (if I'm allowed to have one as a heterosexual male) is minimalistic and clean. Still, there is something endearing in these old designs.  Though the sardines are arranged in a pleasing pattern, this is not endearing. This is horrifying, (oh, but those cu...