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All I hear lately is how “kids today have no imagination.” They don’t read, they don’t think, and with all the video games stunting their creativity, they’ve even lost the ability to make things up. Because that’s our tale of the trenches, isn’t it? That we had to use our imaginations when we were kids. How dreadful. We had to make up our own games.

But let’s examine this. Sure, I was one of the windblown rascals tearing around backyards making up games. But it wasn’t because there was nothing else available. Those were simply the only kind of games I liked. Archaic as we were, we did have prepackaged options, but while some kids wet themselves with glee at the mention of Monopoly or Electronic Battleship, my heart always sank when the fun headed in this direction. I didn’t want to sit indoors and run some redundant, predetermined gauntlet. I wanted to make shit up.

This hatred of board games followed me into adulthood. On vacations with friends, I was chastised for my lack of patience and huffing boredom while others spent hours rolling dice around a slab of cardboard. Life is wrought with enough problems. Why would you purchase problems in a box? It wasn’t until I heard comedian Steven Wright repeat nearly this exact sentiment in an interview that it occurred to me I wasn’t alone. Maybe there are two types of people—the kind that want to be in control and create the games, and the ones that are happy just to play.

It’s impossible that every single kid now under the age of sixteen is obsessed with video games, just as every kid we played in the woods with wasn’t a rule-maker. In hindsight, while we were in the forest playing Danger Island, there were maybe three or four of us concocting the rules—the rest of the hoards just followed what was presented. This doesn’t mean they lacked imagination. After all, can we not enjoy a book that someone else has written? Perhaps the obsessive video gaming children fall into this category; their imaginations are stimulated by the machinations of others, and while they might never create a game themselves, they can certainly appreciate its creativity.

This isn’t to say I understand the whole game-love thing. I admit that part of this is because I have no patience, and part of it’s because I really really suck at them. Sure, I frequented the arcades back in my day, but once things went beyond Galaga and Xaxon, I was pretty much done. I’ve never quite learned how to use the new controllers either, with the whole press this arrow to move and this one to jump and these two at the same time to pick things up. Just give me a joystick with a blast button and show me what to blow up.

But I’ve been trying to widen my perceptions regarding today’s youth, because as much as I have to admit my prejudices—and I do have them (will you boys please pull up your pants for Christ sakes?)—I remember when it was my childhood generation being ostracized as shallow, capitalist techno-zombies.

We had dozens of hippie babysitters watch us after school, and when they weren’t smoking joints in the bathroom, they’d shake their dread heads and point their finger at us. “Look at you, man,” they’d say. “With your color TVs and your Atari and your ten speed bikes, man.” These rants usually turned into something akin to ‘blah blah blah commercialism, blah blah blah Vietnam’, but in their perspective, we were the ones squashing the hard earned imagination out of their world. We were the generation that had stopped thinking and chose the easy way out. Their lives had been full of deep thoughts and revolutions of the soul, while ours was a party at Caligula’s house.

And if that’s how they saw us, we need to entertain the possibility that our view of the younger generation is probably skewed as we look through our outdated Fisher Price View Masters. Aside from technological enhancements, these kids aren’t all that different from us in the imagination department. I mean, was our youth culture really so brilliant? I questioned this after a sobering altercation with my favorite fifteen-year-old.

The teen in question asked if I thought his mother was being unfair when she confiscated several of his new rap CDs, due to “abhorrent sexual content.” Although I’d always been the cool friend-of-mom, I said I had to side with his mother on this one. Rap music was full of blatant sexual innuendo that kids his age shouldn’t be listening to.

“You grew up in the 80s, right?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“You listened to Whitesnake?”
“Yes,” I said. “I listened to Whitesnake.”
“Huh. What was that big hit they had? Oh I remember now. I’m gonna slide it in right to the top.”
“Yeah but—”
“And what was that April Wine album you had?”
“Harder Faster. But that’s not the same, because—”
“Right, and I’m remembering an AC/DC song. Let me think…”
“Okay,” I said. “I see where you’re going, but—”
“Ah, got it. Let me put my love into you, babe.”
“Uh huh.”
“Let me cut your cake with my knife.”
“Alright, alright. I’ll go talk to your mother.”

As he walked away I stared distastefully at his ensemble, wanting to yell at him to pull up his pants and tuck in his boxer shorts. But suddenly I had a flashback of myself, razor blade in hand, strategically slicing up the legs and ass of my jeans before a Bon Jovi concert.
At the time, it was very imaginative.

END

Adrienne Jones is a speculative fiction and award winning humor writer, and author of the books Brine, Gypsies Stole My Tequila and The Hoax. Despite a well publicized belief in fish people, she’s managed to convince most she’s perfectly normal. Visit her author site at www.hoaxthenovel.com.

All three of Adrienne’s books can be ordered from the Apex aStore.