You would have been 72 today.
You died by suicide 30 years ago. Namely, because you couldn’t take it anymore. You hated yourself. You hated this life. You hated where the world was heading. So you left.
You’d probably hate it even more today. For one thing, they sell water in bottles now.
You would have had a problem when bottled water became a thing. But now it’s normal. Everyone pays for bottled water, and we gladly pay several dollars MORE when the bottle looks fancier. We still throw the bottle away, but we feel happier about it.
Ketchup comes in plastic now. No more VCRs. Willie Nelson is still singing.
Speaking of music. Popular music has officially gone to crap. Radio music might have been bad when you were young, but things have gotten a lot worse than “Yummy Yummy Yummy,” by Ohio Express.
When you were born, the chart-toppers were Les Paul and Mary Ford singing “Via con Dios,” and Hank Senior singing “Kaw-Liga.”
Today, we don’t even have artists. We have strippers who lip sync. In time, we won’t even have that.
AI is already writing, producing, mixing, and mastering bestselling songs in less than two minutes. Millions of people follow bands who are not actual bands, but AI-generated profiles.
The AI bands use AI band photos. These photos LOOK real inasmuch as the band members follow the cherished tradition of dressing weird, sporting bizarre hairstyles, and wearing serious band-photo faces which indicate severe constipation. But they aren’t real people. Their music is not music, but digital data. Ones and zeros.
Politics has turned into hatred. One side hates the other. The other side despises the other. And if a person refuses to choose a side, this person has chosen the most hated side of all.
There are mass shootings now. That wasn’t a thing when you were alive. Today, in the US, a mass shooting occurs, approximately, every 12.5 days.
Every time a shooting happens, people grieve and get outraged. The killer receives thousands of compiled hours of news network coverage and becomes a household name. You rarely hear about the victims. Then, everyone just goes back to hating the other side again.
Let’s see, what else has changed in 72 years?
TV sucks. The average person subscribes to approximately 529 streaming services and still can’t find anything to watch. But it’s better than watching network TV, where you are forced to watch an estimated 1,248 accumulated minutes of pharmaceutical commercials.
Americans weigh more. The average weight of an American male in the 1950s was about 150 pounds. Today, our average weight is 210 pounds.
We eat more pesticides than we used to. Our grocery-store vegetables taste like tennis balls. We quit going to movie theaters. There are no more newspapers. In 50 years, books are expected to be extinct.
We check our smartphone every 8 to 10 seconds. We send about 50 to 100 texts per day. Teens send an average of 243 texts per day.
Hardly anyone smokes anymore. Nobody wears neckties. Pantyhose are archaic. We pick up our dog’s poop now. There is a YouTube video for everything. Cars drive themselves. Everything—and I mean EVERYTHING—is captured on camera.
But do you know what? Despite all the sadness, despite the hatred, despite the modernity, war, and graphic acts of politics, I still love it here. I would never bail out on my own life.
Because I still love the people. I still love loving. I still love this earth. I still love every day.
And even though you’ve been gone for 30 years, even though you left a lifetime of destruction in your wake, even though you killed part of me when you killed yourself, I still love you.
Happy birthday, Dad.