2001-08-24 - 11:54 p.m.
I�m being a loser tonight. I�d planned on going down to the Gaslamp with some friends, but I decided I�d rather stay home instead. Trying to be social and to make myself heard in a crowded bar blaring with the Greatest Hits of the �80s That We�ve All Heard a Fucktillion Times didn�t seem worth the energy.
(One of my pet peeves about bars and clubs is that hardly any of them have normal tables to sit at anymore. I mean tables and chairs like they have in restaurants, where you can sit down and have a civilized conversation out of everyone�s eye level-- everywhere I go to these days the chairs are all the same height as the stools at the bar. Which is fine, I guess, if you�re ambulatory and of average height and want to see and be seen--but it bites if you�re short-statured and/or permanently seated. You get ... splayed at, constantly. Staring into people�s crotches all evening sounds like a lot more fun than it really is, trust me--not everyone�s crotch is good to stare at, and some of them smell quite rank from that distance.)
So I did what any true loser does on Friday night: I channel-surfed. I eventually hit "Free To Be ... You and Me" on TVLand and very nearly lapsed into a coma.
Jumping Jesus on a pogo stick--I�d totally forgotten about that particular chunk of my �70s childhood. I remember it actually aired in prime time. There was an album that went with it, too--I used to have a copy. I have no idea what happened to it. I probably stuck a Dead Kennedys album next to it one day and it spontaneously combusted.
Marlo Thomas. Alan Alda. Rosie Grier singing about how it�s all right for boys to cry (sure it is--if you�re as big as Rosie Grier and can pummel the stuffing out of anyone who teases you about it). Michael Jackson singing about how he never wants to grow up (no, really?). Some freaky story about a boy and his doll. An even freakier story about some prissy little bitch who�s always saying, "Ladies first!" and ends up getting eaten by tigers.
It�s hard to believe that show aired the same year The Exorcist came out.
Then again, no, it�s not.
GenXers laugh at stuff like this because, in retrospect, it seems so naive and pollyannish. The 1990s were such a huge, stinky mess in terms of gender and race relations that the white middle-class liberals who flourished 30 years ago--or at least the subspecies who genuinely believed that racism and sexism could all be strummed away with a few folk songs--became extinct. Once Andrea Dworkin and Louis Farrakhan showed up the air became too toxic for them and they either suffocated or turned into Camille Paglia.
I miss them. They were dorky, their politics were simplistic and infantile, and those fuckawful Dacron jumpsuits have got to go, but I miss them. I think I�m going to cry--Rosie Grier said it was ok.
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