Fuck tequila. I've got your panty stripper right here.

As an old man, it’s my right, my duty, and my unavoidable habit to accuse the generations below me of being softer than I am and liking stuff that sucks compared to the stuff I liked as a kid. If I’m not ranting about twitter and MTV raising a nation of pussies or letting people younger than me know that MTV used to be cool when they played music instead of reality tv all day, I’m not doing my job.

This is my role, just like their role is to ignore me and believe that they’re the only generation that “gets” it. I yell about having to share a phone that was attached to a wall with my entire family growing up, and they roll their eyes and compliment each other on this fresh new style of shoes that they’re all wearing called “High Tops”.

Most of the time, I manage to keep this in check; any time I’m getting ready to start accusing the generations below me of being a new breed of fuck ups, I think back to 18 year old me and realize that the clothes and the music were a little bit different when I was that age, but other than that, we were almost exactly the same.

There is an exception to this rule, I think, and it’s been bothering me a little bit.

Where is the music that pisses off people’s parents?

When Rock and Roll first showed up, it freaked out adults. They only showed Elvis above the waist on the Ed Sullivan show, because the network didn’t want teenage girls seeing The King’s hips swiveling in a suggestive fashion. At the time, it was believed that the sight of a man in leather pants gyrating his pelvis would make it physically impossible for teenage girls to NOT have wild, unprotected sex with anything and everything that they could find. People still remember Elvis, but not as a menace to the virginity of young girls everywhere. It has more to do with his music, his love of fatty food, and that he died on the can.

I have to get off track for a second here – everyone talks about Elvis’ death while on the toilet like it’s a mark of shame of some kind, that there’s no worse way to go. What the fuck? When you go, you should be somewhere comfortable, doing something that you love. Something like, I don’t know, snacking on a fried peanut butter banana sandwich and evacuating your bowls while you’re high on painkillers. Think about it: Doesn’t that sound pretty nice? Even without a sandwich and a bunch of Vicodin, I always enjoy my time in the bathroom; I get plenty of reading done, nobody tries to interrupt me, and it’s nice and quiet. The question isn’t “Is there a worse way to go?”, It’s “Is there a better way to go?” Hell, I hope that’s how I go, assuming that it’s not at the hands of an animatronic shark from the shower (although I would feel a certain level of vindication about my fear of them while bathing if one were to kill me – It would certainly teach a lesson to all of you judgmental assholes that have been making fun of me for all these years). The only way it could be any better is if someone I hated was the first paramedic on the scene and had to deal with my cold, dead, poop-smeared corpse.

"I knew it! Time to make sure that my 5th grade girlfriend is the first person here, and then enjoy a smug death."

Let’s move on.

When I was a child, my earliest memory of this phenomenon was 2 Live Crew’s Me So Horny. I remember segments on the news about how terrifyingly inappropriate the song was, and how badly is was going to fuck up kids. To their credit, that song was pretty dirty; at one point towards the end, one of the guys requests that a girl suck his asshole. We’ll never know if she did or not, because the song ends after that. It’s one of the great mysteries of our time. After the initial media outrage, the band kind of faded off into obscurity (barring, of course, Hoochie Mama). People still listen to that song, but no one seems to be afraid that it warps minds like they used to.

Later on in the mid 90′s, it was gangster rap that had the media’s attention. Newsweek articles and adult panic focused on it. If I cried one manly tear of blood every time in the mid 90′s that I heard someone bitching about how these goddamn misogynist rappers referred to women as “bitches” and “hoes”, I could canoe everywhere on a river of blood. (Look, I know that didn’t make very much sense. I spent all of my blogging time doing homework and now it’s very late. Just shut up and go with it.) Most of those guys are still around, but nobody seems to be threatened anymore. Dr. Dre has quite a bit of mainstream respect now, and I think everyone on the planet now thinks that Snoop Dogg’s antics are endearing instead of dangerous. The public finds him roughly as threatening as they found Bill Cosby in the late 80′s.

"Despair, 'Sheeple'! Am I blowing your tiny, conformist mind with my dapper top hat and my turquoise eye shadow?

After that, the panic switched to Marilyn Manson. He wore a lot of goofy makeup and wacky latex outfits with breasts built into them, and it freaked adults out. I remember it all peaked in 1999 when Columbine happened. There were accusations that his music was what caused Klebold and Harris to shoot up their school (along with the game Doom II), and he even canceled a leg of his tour that was running through Colorado. Now, nobody cares. He released an album about two weeks ago, and even though it’s the same kind of thing he was coming out with in the late 90′s, nobody seems to think that it’s going to push an impressionable 17 year old over the edge.

Which brings us to Eminem, who said plenty of goofy shit about abusing drugs, women and homosexuals. Once again, everyone’s prognosis was grim for their children, who’s minds were being poisoned by his wacky lyrics about Vicodin, misogyny, and the murder of his wife while his child was in the car with him. I remember that everyone thought that it was a relatively big deal when he did “Stan” with Elton John.

And, once again…nobody cares anymore. He released a new CD last month, which, by all accounts, is filthier than anything he’s done before. I don’t know if he’s deliberately going balls to the wall with the shock value, but it certainly seems like it. It’s number one on the billboard album chart right now, and yet, so far, no parent groups are frightened by it.

And then…well, maybe I’m out of the loop, but it seems like it dropped off. I haven’t read a single article or seen a single protest aimed at an artist since, and I’m not sure why.

Is the music being written not offensive enough to freak parents out? That seems unlikely. Surely there’s something out there that parents can blame their children’s problems on, but I don’t know where it is! Am I just getting too old to keep track of this crap? That also seems improbable. Now that I’m old, I should be one of the first to know if old people are freaked out about something.

Maybe it’s just time for me to accept something that I’ve suspected all along:

That today’s youth are a bunch of pansies who’s steady diet of T-Pain, The Black Eyed Peas and Green Day has tuned them soft.

I’m just kidding.

But seriously, artists. You need to step your game up. I know that you’re trying to push the envelope, but if 35 year olds don’t think you’re fucking up their kids, you’re not doing your job. Here’s some material for you to study:

Fuck what you’ve heard, and save your drama. All I want is my hoochie, mama.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s very late and I have to go to bed. See you on Wednesday.

I’ve owned this blog for about a year and a half now.

About four months in, I wrote a post about a dream I had involving David Lee Roth tucking his penis in between his legs for a music video, and my friend in the dream explaining to me that doing that is called “Cobra Kai’n it”.

Once that post went live, the popularity of my blog took off. I mean, not a lot – a normal website probably gets as many hits in an hour as I get in a month – but I was surprised by the number of people showing up.

Unfortunately, a little bit of research revealed that it had nothing to do with the writing I was doing. People were swarming to my site because they wanted pictures of David Lee Roth. I can see what search terms are bringing people to my site, and “David Lee Roth” or some variation, usually including the words “naked” or “penis” is almost always near the top. A list of which search terms have brought in traffic since I started tracking it put “david lee roth” at the very top with 8,959 searches. Second place is “succubus” – with 756. It’s not even close. The divide between first and second is even farther when you consider that there are 27 more variations of DLR on the list, accounting for who knows how many more hits.

No matter how many times I write a post about David Lee Roth, I am always, ALWAYS able to find an even more insane picture of him than any other I've posted.

Ever since realizing this, if I’ve ever started to feel a little bit too good about the number of visitors to the site, I’ve always been able to bring myself back down to earth with big slice of humble pie a la David Lee Roth. His name has been the number one search term directing people here ever since last April.

Until now.

A few days ago, I started noticing large spikes in my traffic again. It could only mean one thing: People had a case of David Lee Roth fever, and they had it bad.

Or at least, that’s what I thought. It was a little bit different than usual. There are a few old posts that get a lot of traffic because they have a picture in them that people are interested in. When people are looking for pictures of “Succubus”, there are a lot of views of an older post where I was gushing about a now ex-girlfriend that had a picture of a succubus in it. When it’s Phil Anselmo, it’s the one about the high school girl that looked like him. When people were looking for DLR, they go to either the one about Cobra Kai’n it, or the one about the massive increase in traffic thanks to his pictures.

When I looked at the data this time, though, everybody was flocking to a post that I didn’t remember having a single bit of information about Diamond Dave in it. I went to look at it, and I was right. It was a really short post that wasn’t much but a video of some guy playing ragtime piano and a picture of a horse penis…

Oh.

A look at the search terms verified it: I have a new term bringing the traffic into my website: “Horse Penis”. In fact, it’s been the number one search term for almost a week now.

I’m torn about this. Should I be happy or sad that the number one thing that people come to my blog for is pictures of a horse’s dong?

Whatever.

I’ll try to have part three of my exploration of Internet Dating up next week. I’ll be sure to put in a few pictures of animal wangs to be sure it gets plenty of traffic.

The other day, Anthony introduced me to yooouuutuuube.com. It’s a goofy little gimmick, but I’m kind of in love with it. After seeing it, I did what I always do, and leeched it off of him, claiming it as my own discovery and putting the link up on Facebook. The song I picked for it was “Natural One” by Folk Implosion, because the video is weird, and because that’s one of those songs that I constantly forget that I love until I hear it on an old mixtape or the radio.

Anthony is also apparently a fan of the song, and recalled how he used to sit around and wait for videos to show up on MTV, and then pointed out that the kids these days don’t know what it’s like to wait for a video to come on the air.

This is true. One of the things that I find strange about the students I work with is that none of them really remember a time before the Internet. A typical high school senior was born in the early 90′s, so by the time they were eight years old, the Internet was in most households. There’s always been a gigantic assload of information waiting at their fingertips, 24 hours a day. No fact is too stupid or too small, no song is too shitty or esoteric, no object is too worthless or obscure. It’s all out there and relatively easy to find.

This line of thought sent me spiraling into old man mode – I started thinking about how it was fucking up our nation’s youth that they didn’t know what it was like to have to wait for anything or deal with any sort of delayed gratification. I have to steal at least one cell phone per class because kids can’t wait until they see their friend in the hall to tell them what a whore the girl in front of them was dressed like, they have to twitter it anytime they cough or have a solid BM, and three days before an album is out they already have a copy and are bitching about how they’ve “sold out”.

Then I realized something: I don’t really remember life before the Internet either. I’m exactly like the students.

Remember these badboys? I call this one "Boner Jams '96". I'm just kidding. I never could have come up with something that clever in 1996.

I thought back to highschool. There was a remix of “Hey Man Nice Shot” by Filter that I wanted really, REALLY bad. I would wait and hope that they would play it on the radio, and occasionally they would, but it seemed like I would never have a cassette tape cued up and ready to record when it was time. I went to record stores looking for it, but it was nowhere to be found. I wasn’t really even too sure who did the remix or what album I could find it on; there was no fucking Internet to look it up on, remember?

Finally, one day when my friend Kevin and I were at a used record sale at The Finest in Ft. Collins, I stumbled on the single, bought it for a few dollars, and then breathed a sigh of relief. From when I heard it on the radio the first time to when I finally had a copy that I could listen to whenever I wanted, my search took about a year and a half.

Lock up your daughters, gentleman. The Scatman is in town. Did I say "daughters"? I meant "young boys and barnyard animals".

I did a little experiment just now, and in two minutes and thirty seven seconds, I was able to find a page streaming the remix and telling me who it was by, a video on youtube, three torrents that I could download it from and a link on iTunes I could use to purchase it. It even has it’s own fucking wikipedia page. It’s a 14 year old single, and in less than five minutes I can have it playing on my stereo while I’m reading two pages of information about it. You would think from the level of information available about it that it was one of the most influential songs of 1995 (narrowly beating out “Gangsta’s Paradise”, “Big Poppa”, “Bulls on Parade” and “The Scatman”).

Everything else is this way now, too. If I want to know the name of that guy who played “Middle Age Man” on SNL twenty years ago, I can find the actor’s name, a short clip of the skit and a page listing every date and channel that it has been shown on since it was first aired.

There was a time when your chance to see an episode of a television show was when it aired. Once it was over, you might get lucky and catch a rerun during the summer, but that was it. Now, I think more people watch tv on hulu, tivo and media PCs than when it actually airs.

The only thing that I found more interesting than boobs at the age of 13 was Street Fighter II, and I can purchase a full arcade cabinet on ebay for $75.

These are all just things that I was interested in that are fifteen years old. It’s even easier to get my hands on things that were produced in this decade.

And I think, for the most part, that this is a good thing. I certainly take advantage of it.

But I’ve gotten a little bit de-sensitized to it, and that makes me sad.

I remember when I first got a copy of Napster running on my computer. I think that was when I really figured out that the Internet was going to change the way things worked. Instead of spending a lot of time and energy staying on top of who was making music that I liked and when their album was coming out, digging through bins at record stores, waiting for special orders and shelling out $15, I typed a band name into a little search field, and if anyone else had a copy of it, not only could I get it for free, I didn’t have to wait. I remember sitting there, tenting in my pants as I slowly realized what the implications were for my free time and my wallet.

Anytime I see this image, I'm hit by equally powerfull waves of nostalgia and embarrassment. What the hell? Whatchu want me to say? I won't lie, and I can't deny....Jesus, what's wrong with me?

Unfortunately, as time has passed, I no longer find the Internet a magical luxury, and instead just expect it to do shit for me. I’m vaguely irritated if I have to wait more than ten minutes after an album is out to get a copy of it, and if I can’t find what I want anywhere and realize that I may have to purchase the actual, physical CD, I’m completely perplexed.

It’s also changed the way that I listen to music. I have more trouble than I used to putting an album in and listening to it from start to finish. I didn’t always love all of the songs on an album(I almost never did, actually), but there was something kind of satisfying about listening to a new CD all the way through.

Furthermore, even though it’s nice that the work of getting music has largely been eliminated, I think the treasure hunt respect of it added value to the music in my brain. Let me share a shameful memory with you: I nearly shit my pants waiting for Limp Bizkit’s second album to come out. In the weeks before its release, I eagerly waited for “Nookie” to play on the radio or MTV so I could get a little taste of Fred Durst’s weepy, awkward rapping about how mean girls were. When it finally came out, and I spent my fifteen dollars on the album, my nipples were hard for six weeks; After scraping and scrounging for a few minutes of radio play here and there all summer, my brain had elevated the value of that album somewhere between gold and oxygen, and now I could listen to Fred Durst tell me that he was a sucker like he said, fucked up in the head, not, WHENEVER THE FUCK I WANTED TO.

I’ve complained several times since then that even though I’m still a fan, music doesn’t pump me up like it did as a teenager. Some of it is that I’m not 19 anymore, but I think some of it is also that there’s no delayed gratification involved anymore either. Not just with music. With books, movies, television – it’s all there, all the time.

Do I think that it’s a bad thing? Not at all. I love having access to all of this information, and there are books that I wouldn’t read, movies I wouldn’t see, and Street Fighter II arcade cabinets that I wouldn’t buy if it wasn’t all sitting at my fingertips.

But I do remember the feeling that I got whenever I got my hands on an album that I’d special ordered, or figured out the name of a song I loved on the radio that had eluded me, or the week that I spent listening to The Prodigy’s “The Fat of the Land” from start to finish when it finally came out, and it makes me a little bit sad that the little part of my brain that is stimulated by delayed gratification just sits there and atrophies now, next to the parts that filter what I say and the one that keeps my scrotum youthful and elastic.

Lately, I’ve been listening to streaming Internet radio while I do my homework and a few days ago a song came on that I really liked. I checked the playlist, but the station didn’t have the name of the song listed.

After an initial wave of irritation and worry that I wouldn’t be able to immediately download the song and have it forever, I took a deep breath, went back to my books, and decided to just enjoy the song, whatever it was, until it ended and disappeared into the ether, without me ever knowing what it was called.

Dane Cook: Voted most likely to leave me standing in front of my television, scratching my head and trying to figure what keeps causing the audience to laugh.

It’s that time of year again. Spring is in the air. A young man’s fancy turns to love, my allergies start to be become oppressively awful, I need to figure out a way to survive three months without any income, all of the sports I enjoy go into the off-season, T.V. is nothing but reruns, and it gets miserably hot. Fuck this time of year.

There’s something else going on, though: High school graduation.

I haven’t attended a high school graduation since my little sister’s, but I find them hilarious. Well, actually, I mostly find them boring. The speeches are usually pretty weak, the music sucks, and you spend most of the time watching a bunch of people walk across a stage while they read off names. But there are some very specific things about them that I find hilarious. Specifically, the students.

I think high school seniors are an incredibly entertaining demographic, and the things I find entertaining about them all peak at their high school graduation.

Sure, there are some things that make seniors a little bit difficult to deal with – they tend to think that they’re the center of the universe, they think everyone older than 23 is literally mentally retarded, and they’re usually phoning in high school pretty hard, especially by the end of the year. But they have a quality that I enjoy:

They all think that they’re destined for greatness, and that everyone around them is too. I don’t get enough of that in everyday life.

Most people my age don’t really remember what this feels like, because they’ve been in the labor force for too long. No matter how successful someone is at 30, they’ve had to make compromises of some sort with their life that they never anticipated at 18. Trust me, though. That feeling of greatness saturates high school.

My high school graduation was kind of a hazy blur, especially after a decade, but I remember a few things about it.

I sat next to a girl named Amber who I haven’t seen since. They played that “Rent” song about measuring a year in raindrops, or cups of coffee, or clown porn, or I don’t know what else, but most importantly, in love. I don’t remember if they played “I will remember you” by Sarah McLaughlin, but it seems almost impossible that they didn’t, because I think every high school graduation is contractually obligated to play that song at least once.

More importantly, though, I remember one of the speakers saying something along the lines of “Sitting among you, I see the future of America. I see the next great politicians, artists and scientists.”

William Murderface: Voted most likely to wake up with a clown's hand down his pants.

At every graduation ceremony that I have seen or been a part of since then, one of the speakers has said something along these lines. The next great scientific breakthrough is waiting to be discovered, the next great novel is waiting to be written, the next great guitar solo is waiting to be shredded by someone sitting in the crowd of bright-eyed 18 year olds sitting before them.

Even though I have heard some variation of this at every graduation ceremony that I have ever attended, I never believed it quite as much as I did on the day of my high school graduation. It was the first time that I had really considered the fact that we were on our way to becoming adults, and adults were the ones who ran the country. Someone had to write the great American novel. Someone had to be president in twenty years. Someone had to play quarterback for the Denver Broncos. Why WOULDN’T it be one of us, or, more probably, me specifically doing all three at once?

At 18, I had this sort of vague, undefined idea in my head that I was destined for greatness. I didn’t know what I would be doing, or how I would be doing it, but I was pretty sure that I would be wildly successful.

It was kind of silly, but I don’t think I was the only one thinking that way that day. In fact, the more I get to know high school kids, the more convinced I become that every single one feels this way. The kids with sports scholarships were going to be professional athletes. The kids headed to prestigious colleges were going to cure cancer or be the next Johnny Cochran. The ones spending thirty grand a year going to out of state art school were going to revolutionize musical theater and turn Broadway on its fucking head. Even the depressed, unpopular kids were going to start the greatest band on the planet or write poetry that the generations after them would be studying in school. High school is a great time to over estimate yourself; you’re stuck at home living with your parents, you’re going through a government mandated program, you have clear, easily identifiable and obtainable goals laid out for you by a high school counselor, and you haven’t had very many opportunities to make life-changing choices. High school is a perfect opportunity to believe that you’re destined for greatness.

And, to be fair, some of the people I graduated with have done some pretty amazing things. The kind of things that we all assumed we would be doing when we got out of high school.

Jerry Orbach: Voted most likely to put baby in the corner.

What I didn’t realize until a few years later, though, was that the speaker was only giving us half of the story. He left out the part of the speech that said “I also see America’s next garbage men, meth addicts and fry cooks out there today. I see the guy who will fail out of college during his first semester and then work as a barista, smoke a lot of pot and live with two of his friends in a one bedroom apartment for the next twenty years of his life. I see the girl who thinks she’s going be a fashion designer in New York who is going to accidentally get pregnant her freshman year, drop out of school, marry the father, get a job working for State Farm and raise a couple of kids in walking distance from the home she grew up in. I see the guy who will stumble through a four year degree in eight years and work as a substitute teacher who writes blog posts about the things he shouts when he has an orgasm. No one will be paying him for it, and it will get him in frequent legal trouble, but he’ll keep doing it anyway, because he’s an idiot. Worst of all, I see the guy who’s going to meet all of his goals and realize that he hates his life anyway. What I’m trying to say, people, is that I see a stadium full of teenagers with stars in their eyes that are, for the most part, going to be settling for mediocrity or worse when they realize that life isn’t going to have a guidance counselor telling them what to do all the time. By definition, if some of you here are going to be extraordinary, that means that most of you have to be average! HA-DO-KEN!!!”

So why did the speaker leave that part out? A few reasons.

First of all, it’s a total downer. Well, maybe not. It might be hilarious, as evidenced by Matt Foley, motivational speaker. Probably a downer though.

Second of all, he would be wasting his breath, because no high school senior would believe you if you told them any of that. They are way too jacked about their life. All they want to do is tell each other what a long, strange trip it’s been, compliment each other on the song lyrics that they used for their senior quotes, admire their sweet senior picture that shows them sitting by a tree and staring pensively towards the horizon with a guitar in their hands, and most importantly, get the hell out of this shit-hole town and move to the cosmopolitan college town of Topeka, Kansas, or Lansing, Michigan.

Besides, that speaker was just some tired old man, and none of that shit he said is going to matter anyway when they’re living on a moon base and seducing hot aliens with sweet licks on their space guitar. Hell, even the people who are planning to go to a trade school or get married and have kids are completely fired up. No matter what their plans are for the future, they are VERY excited about them and have trouble imagining the rest of their life as anything other than pure euphoria.

Is that over the top optimism and enthusiasm a little bit silly? Probably. Unrealistic? Definitely.

But it’s also kind of fun to be around people like that, and it’s really hard to not get excited for people who believe that their dreams, no matter how far-fetched, are not only completely reasonable and obtainable, but almost inevitable.

Humpty: Voted most likely to tickle your rear in a 69, using his "humpty nose"

During the last week of school this year, I overheard one student talk about how excited he was to get into computer science and how much money he was going to make.

Another one told me that he was planning to work for a while before deciding if he wanted to go to college or maybe do trade school instead. I think it’s a pretty good idea, but he was fired up out of his mind about it.

One girl was headed to an art school in California where she was going to get a photography degree at the price of $30,000 a year. If someone my age were going to do this, they would probably feel the need to point out that they knew it was a little bit silly, but they loved photography, or they were aware that it was risky to spend $120,000 to get a degree in such a highly competitive area. Not this girl though. No embarrassment, no worry, just pure, unadulterated enthusiasm about how awesome it was going to be to go to school in California to learn about something she loved and then become a photographer.

I can get on board for that. It’s fun to be around people who think that way. I know that not all of them will succeed, and even the ones that do will probably have to come to terms with the fact that things aren’t as perfect as they imagined, but it’s infections to be around people who are that fired up. I spend a lot of time explaining to myself why it’s unreasonable and unrealistic for me to want or expect any of the things I want out of life, and it’s fun to watch a bunch of 18 year old Tony Robbins’ talking with each other about all of the cool shit that they’re going to do.

So congratulations, class of 2009. I see the next time travelling cosmonaut movie star out there amongst you, even if it’s not as clearly as you can see him. Now go out there and chase your dreams, you crazy motherfuckers. I love you guys.