Hooray for the French Revolution! I am the Prince of Bastille Day (according to my friends in Tallahassee Florida that celebrate the day by getting drunk and popping Quaaludes (marked with ‘714’ on the pill). Therefore they made me the “Prince” of Bastille Day and would dose my beers with quaaludes until I passed out.) Hooray for Quaaludes!
I was born or hatched on July 14, 1969…the summer of love. Some would say a great time to be born! I say, “thanks for nothing”. Why?
I was born Gen X, of the Baby Boomers, during the summer of love and the heyday of the “Me” Generation. A group of American’s that account for the biggest generation ever, some 75 million strong and quickly growing elderly, these folks took their newfound freedom to mean that all bets were off and the rearing of children could be outsourced – divorce, working parents, latch-key, broken economy, lost values, and an about-face when it comes to the ideals that they fought for in the 60ies and 70ies.
But I am not here to bury the Boomers, I am here to celebrate the day of my birth that is also the birthday of Ingmar Bergman, one of the greatest film directors to grace the Earth.
- 7/14/1969 – 714 – 21…
- 714 was the total number of home runs Babe Ruth hit
- 714 was the badge number of Sgt. Joe Friday, played by Jack Webb in the radio and television series Dragnet.
- 714 Delaware Street was the home address of the Connors in the television series Roseanne.
- Area code 714 was the telephone area code for most of Southern California beyond Los Angeles County during the 1960s and 1970s. It would later be reduced in size until it essentially only covered portions of Orange County.
- 714 is a slang term for the drug, methaqualone. This is due to the fact that 714 was stamped on the tablet sold under the brand name Quaalude by William H Rorer Inc.
(Thank you Wikipedia) Now back to bitching…
So basically, I am a grumpy Generation X member that is listless, lazy and lost in space. I will leave you with a quote from a mid-nineties article in Time Magazine that tells you who I am, who Gen X is, much better than I could:
. . .They possess only a hazy sense of their own identity but a monumental preoccupation with all the problems the preceding generation will leave for them to fix . . .This is the twentysomething generation, those 48 million young Americans ages 18 through 29 who fall between the famous baby boomers and the boomlet of children the baby boomers are producing. Since today’s young adults were born during a period when the U.S. birthrate decreased to half the level of its postwar peak, in the wake of the great baby boom, they are sometimes called the baby busters. By whatever name, so far they are an unsung generation, hardly recognized as a social force or even noticed much at all…By and large, the 18-to-29 group scornfully rejects the habits and values of the baby boomers, viewing that group as self-centered, fickle and impractical.While the baby boomers had a placid childhood in the 1950s, which helped inspire them to start their revolution, today’s twentysomething generation grew up in a time of drugs, divorce and economic strain. . .They feel paralyzed by the social problems they see as their inheritance: racial strife, homelessness, AIDS, fractured families and federal deficits.