Back in my day,
We didn't have robot pets whose behavior is based on interactions with us; we had Sea Monkeys that resembled swimming maggots, and they usually died by supper.
We didn't have grass-fed, cage-free, all-naturual meats and organic produce; we had to eat the dead sea monkeys for dinner.
And we didn't have bottled spring water or filtered ionized water; we had to drink the water from the sea monkey container.
MP3, iPod, satterlite radio? Ha! We had to listen to our old man's rhythmic tone of put-downs and the solo percussion section that usually followed when he threw punches at our heads.
We had no cell phone and our older sister was always on the kitchen phone talking to her mullet-haired, Camaro-driving, high-school dropout boyfriend; we had to, instead, ride our yellow plastic banana skateboard through town, across two main freeways, and up a long hill to our friend's house, where in the end we found that he wasn't home because his parents placed him into a youth halfway house for smoking hash (which was fake, because it was actually the moist soot we scraped out of our dad's Oldsmobile tail pipe and sold it to him for $3).
And so we rode our yellow plastic banana skateboard back across town, and got hit by a milk truck driven by the drunk father of the camaro-driving boyfriend of our sister's. There was no Helivac to fly us to the hospital; we had to pick up our shoes and our teeth and limp home on a broken leg and a crushed pelvis. (It wasn't easy breathing with a collapsed lung.)
Our parents weren't the worry type like the high-strung, all-organic, everything-for-the-kids parents of today. When they found us at the front door with our bloody mouth, missing teeth, broken leg and crushed pelvis, they screamed at us for ruining a good pair of hand-me-down shoes.
That night we had no dinner and sister got to eat our portion of the dead sea monkeys.
You spoiled ba$tards have it good today.
