Where the title of this blog comes from...

In the fall of 1995, JJ, a fraternity brother of mine whose last name I can't remember at all and then-editor-in-chief of The Bachelor asked me if I wanted to write an opinion column for the school newspaper. He didn't give me a word limit or any sort of restriction on the topics, and he got his money's worth.

Over the next thirteen weeks, I'll be giving you a trip through the mind of Lonnie Dusch circa 1995-1996. In reading these again - and thanks to Katydid, Grace, Alex, and Nate for typing them up from the only print copies I had left of the columns - I have a whole jumble of emotions:

• ...surprise at how little a number of the opinions have changed since then...
• ...embarrassment at the often clumsy prose...
• ...shame and my willingness to all but pick fights with my readers...
• ...thanks to a number of friends and fraternity bros on campus for being willing proofreaders...
• ...horror at my ignorance...

All that being said, I offer the columns largely unedited. Some of the typos may be the fault of the aforementioned student aides who retyped them, but many of them are probably mine and existed in the original columns.

For good or for ill, all of the ideas and the words are mine.

“On Aug. 9, 1995, Jerry Garcia died in his deep sleep at serenity Knolls drug treatment center, in the Marion Country community of Forest Knolls, north of San Francisco.” This week Rolling Stone magazine opened an article entitles “Funeral for a Friend” with this sentence. The issue was devoted almost entirely to the passing of a great musician and, tangentially, to the passing of the final remnants of a now-bygone era. For almost twenty-eight years now, this magazine has tried to represent, report, and occasionally to create the trends of the times. For the last few years, however, the magazine has seemed to become both a chronicler and a disparager of Generation X.

My offense is aimed, however, not only at Rolling Stone. It is aimed at Richard Linkleiter for his portrayal of this generation in the movie Slacker, from which another nickname for my accusing is of laziness and hopelessness. And it is aimed at Coca-Cola for marketing OK Cola, a drink aimed at a generation that has supposedly lowered its standards even in the soft drink market.

My offense is aimed at anyone, in fact, who hopes to label me by labeling my contemporaries, who disparages each of us by devoting any amount of their time to glorifying “the good old days” whether they be Haight-Ashbury of Woodstock or Post-World War II prosperity. I reject my labels, everyone of them. I am not a Generation X drop-out, nor a member of the slacker generation, nor a product of the Me decade. I am, quite simply put, of a mid-sized southern Indiana city, and an individual.

My friends are – by and large, though not excessively – a group of people who are hard working, are uncertain of the future, and open to new thoughts and experiences. Some of us listen to music of the past – the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin – and look backwards to time that we have been told were ‘better; of ‘free-er’ or somehow, always unexplainably, more real. Some of us live our lives day to day, drudging through classes and jobs, trying only to keep our heads above water. Some of us live today only in anticipation of tomorrow, striving toward medical school of a teaching job and a happy we need to or want to.

So, you can keep your stories of Acid Tests and rock festivals and of the Ed Sullivan Show. Remember, also, that these brought Altamont, the Democratic convention in Chicago ’68, seeing twenty shooting stars in one night a week ago, of the first time I made love to my girlfriend, of seeing twenty shooting stars in one night a week ago, of the feeling of writing something of which I am happy, and of my life a year from now. I promise never to make an excuse because I’m just a Gen X’er, because I am not. I’m, just more, no less.

“It seems like hundreds of years,” said Garcia, “and it also seems like not too much time at all. I don’t know. Time, you know. Some things haven’t changed at all, really. And the world has changed.”

The world today is different from the one my mother knew when she first heard Bob Dylan on a scratchy record, but it’s not wholly different. Yesterday was what it was but try to look at today, at me, at my age group on our own. I am, simply put, what I am.