I swear, this is the year of belts. Recently, I was given a belt for my birthday. This belt came with a dire warning to NOT punch new holes while wearing it. While this warning was quite unnecessary as I have enough pains without trying, I decided instead to let someone else try it on so I could make the new holes that way. The divorce papers are on their way. No, just kidding. I instead punched several holes in the warning paper as a sacrifice to some pagan god of waste.
On Christmas Day, I received another belt. This one has a new gimmick, where you cut off the extra length you will never need (at least until the end of January when the diet resolution has long since failed), you just put it into the buckle where a demonic ratchet system pulls it through without the holes. Quite a nice system, acutally.
That noted, I must wonder about the "new ingenuity" we face in this day and age and weight. Let us take the belt, for example. For over 40 years, I've seen only belts with the insert-rod-in-hole system (er...yeah...you know what I meant!).Suddenly after decades of the same system, we have something new? Was it necessary? Are they making money off of it? Tune in tomorrow, same bat time, same bat-
Sorry, got carried away there. Yet, I look at this not-so-new century (but fairly new millenium) and see so many changes to what I considered to be an established status quo.
Take fast food restaurants, for example. Back in the day when I ran 9 miles in the snow before school started because my Atari was broken, every fast food restaurant was a well-sized building with huge imaginative logos and large dining rooms. In recent years, these buildings have been put in the dryer and reduced by several sizes into uglified somewhat 3D edifices of right angles, their logos reduced to symbols and their questionable good food reduced to aa pop culture joke.
Then there is American history. Growing up in the 1970s and 80s and just now maturing at almost 2020, I learned a great deal of American history and what the good and the bad were in terms of events and people. Now, people want to rewrite, or in some cases ERASE, history to create something that is, and was, not real. Why? There is a growing sense of "political correctness" (which is a dumb name because I have never seen or met a correct politician) that seeks to offend as few people as possible. Well, folks, as long as there is a human race, people will be offended. Sometimes it is good, other times it is a wrong choice, and still other times it cannot be helped because you just can't tell when someone will be offended.
Then there is gender identification. Now, I will be the first to admit that the idea of homosexuality was a joke to me when I was a teen. It was a joke because I couldn't identify with it. As I got older, I understood it was a thing that existed and it was around me, especially in my California era (1992-2002, RIP). I came to know some homosexual people through school, work, and even in people I had known for years who had identified themselves as gay, lesbian, what have you.Now it has gone beyond the sexual component to an emotional identification. For thousands, even millions, of years, there have been two physical genders in the animal kingdom. Now, within the past 20 years, there has been an explosion of "new" genders. Not physical ones, but mental ones. I have seen some lists of these genders put out by the LGBTQ and whatever letters they have added since. Some seem unique, others seem to blend into one another. It's quite confusing to me, and I suspect it is confusing for the ones who go through those crises themselves. I could go on, but it is a complex topic. I will end this section by saying I respect all people to the best of my ability, but do not respect the demands that I change how I address people, which is already respectful as it is, to appease a small part of the population, however growing. I can't please everyone.
Of course we cannot leave out retail. That used to be so easy. You got into the car, went someplace like a store or mall, got what you needed, and went home, then got arrested when you discovered you forgot to pay. Then Amazon was invented near the end of the 90s. Amazon was this bizarre Internet site where you could buy practically anything and get it shipped quickly and tax-free. Also at this time we got eBay, which was like an online auction, where instead of buying a CD at a store for $10, you could get into an online bidding war for the same item and pay much more, supposedly feeling better from the experience. From there, lots of physical stores began offering online options, and gradually the need for the physical store model has eroded. This is becoming especially true in grocery shopping and even restaurants. You can now order food and groceries in your birthday suit and get them delivered right to your home. The only expectation is that when it arrives you have at least a tie on for decency sake.
So many changes out there right now, I don't know what to make of all of it. Maybe I'm old-fashioned. Maybe I need to get with the times. Maybe that Grubhub Trans-Man-Woman-Porcupine-Androgynous Canteloupe driver better have extra fry sauce!
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