When the GenX brand was coined, it originally didn't include me and my generation.

I guess it does now. (1968) As they say, history is written by the victors, and it sure as fuck wasn't us.

So I never identified with all the GenX "slacker" shit. The whole Linklater thing was for the snivelly little shits who went to private schools and complained that mom and dad only gave them a BMW when they wanted a Porsche. They wore the "slacker" badge proudly, while living off their trust funds.

The rest of us watched the world go to shit as the law schools filled up suddenly and the world was overrun with bored unemployed lawyers trying to find people to sue, so they could support their coke habits.

There was a time in my life when you could get in a fight at a bar, bloody each other's noses, and then buy each other a beer and laugh about it. Now everyone has a lawyer on speed dial for every offense, perceived and real.

My generation couldn't go to college because we wanted to work with personal computers, but the schools were still teaching Fortran and AS/400. So we went out and invented shit, and sold it for a couple of bucks (to someone with a better lawyer), and now we are your middle managers and VPs, and a lot of us don't have the degrees we claim to have.

Wanna know what it was like? Get copies of Mondo 2000, the first three years of Wired, cruise the rec._____ section of Usenet.

Read Gibson's Neuromancer. Read Marshall McLuhan's "The Medium is the Message" and "Understanding Media". He was wrong, but what is important is that we thought he was right at the time. He was our god. (And no "slacker GenXer" will know who he is.)

Watch Repo Man and Paris, Texas and Buckaroo Banzai and Blue Velvet and Hellraiser and the Hitchhiker.

Done with the nostalgia now.

Just don't ever call me "GenX" again, if you wanna live to see the next day. ;-)