National Poetry Month, Day 5

I've been concerned lately about a conversation I had several weeks ago with someone whose tastes in music I respect but who doesn't seem to respect mine. Really you wouldn't believe how many insightful things I've thought of to say to him were we to ever have a similar conversation anytime soon. The problem though is that I can't think of any of those great insights right now to give you an example of what I'm talking about. It's kinda like when you're browsing for movies at a rental store and you knew there were tons of movies you wanted to see but now that you were confronted with so many options your mind was drawing too many blanks. But now I wonder if that's even a good metaphor anymore, you know considering all the rental stores are going out of business and everyone either just rents from those little boxes at grocery stores and gets the shit mailed to them and really it's pretty damn convenient. But yeah, the metaphor. It'll speak to our generation, but the next won't have an idea what I'm talking about. Kinda like how you and I remember going to restaurants all the time that had smoking sections. That was a pretty common thing at one point. Hell, I even remember sitting in the smoking section in high school. They let us smoke, but they knew we weren't 18 yet. And really, that was pretty great. But how do you explain anything to someone who didn't grow up around the same time as you? It's like we've all time-stamped, branded with Cartoon Show X, Cult Kid Classic Movie Y, Video Game System Z. But that shit changes like every 5 years, and depending on where you come into the conversation, you think the previous 5 years before you entered the conversation were absolute shit. My time stamp dictates that I hate Guns 'N Roses and love Nirvana, and just today a coworker roughly my age asked me why I wasn't listening to Nirvana on Kurt Cobain's "Suicide Day" and I laughed because that's the sort of date I used to remember. And really it's not that I don't like Nirvana anymore, it's just that it's hard work to listen to them without that giant rock-star myth swallowing the whole thing, and no wonder kids five years younger than me can't get with it. They didn't get a chance to separate it from the story.