Everyone hates teenagers, except teenagers

I'm a person who can remember everything. Actually a more accurate statement is I have an incredible long term memory and a terrible short term memory. I can remember Danny Hulton's journal entries in grade one but I can't remember to buy bread crumbs to make dinner on my way home from work. When you're in primary school, your life is at it's most current stage. When you're thirteen and under you don't have the ability to reminisce yet, you talk about what happened that day and then you move on. When you enter high school you reminisce about primary school and by grade 11 you're reminiscing about all the times your got drunk at parties and threw stuff off balconies the previous two years. When you enter university you reminisce about dumb shit you did when you were a teenager and amazing stories about Jeremy Gray doing a back flip off a hotel into a boat harbour. Your twenties are a blur and when you hit thirty you reminisce about everything that seemed like it happened a year ago when in actuality it happened five years ago. This makes your start realizing that pictures of parties you were at when you were seventeen were a mind melting thirteen years ago. When I was fourteen, eighteen year olds seemed like they were thirty and the age of twenty-three seemed unfathomable. I had no idea what being twenty three meant at all. Now I'm thirty and I look at twenty year olds like they're thirteen. I wasn't mature when I was twenty, I was mature enough to live on my own but I ate chips, pancakes and drank 950 cans of Steeler beer everyday. Now I've become something I never thought I would be: an ageist. I look down upon 20 year olds and teenagers because I know more than them about life than they do. I can't have a conversation with them because everything they are experiencing I already experienced ten years ago. Everyone hates teenagers except teenagers themselves. When you're in your teens you want respect that you don't deserve and then you grow up you realize why you didn't get it. Looking beyond that I can relate to twenty year olds because I loved being twenty, I had a job with the government, made a lot of money, and drank on patios all summer.

Black Hole Sun

The first time I heard Black Hole Sun was actually the first time I saw the Black Hole Sun video. I didn't watch Much Music, I watched re-runs of the Wonder Years at 4:30pm on CBC, but for some reason in May of 1994 I was watching music videos right before dinner and Soundgarden came on. I was, and still am the type of person who is mesmerized by visuals and colours (even though I'm colour blind)and this video at the time seemed revolutionary, but also I really connected with the song. It just sounded great and that's all I've ever cared about in music is if it sounds good or not, that's the point right? I never usually care what the artist is saying because half of the time it's bullshit. I care about riffs and drum fills and pocketed bass lines. That moment watching Chris Cornell with his new haircut was what got me into music. And what a great time to get into music it was, right when the storm of alternative nation was erupting, indie music was mainstream, under produced bands were being exposed, it was glorious.
After I heard this song I wanted to hear more new songs so I got my friend Jess to make me a mix tape. On this tape was Radiohead - Creep, Soul Asylem - Someone to Shove, Smashing Pumpkins - Rocket, Soundgarden - Black Hole Sun, Hole - Violet, White Zombie - Thunderkiss 65, and Nirvana - Smells Like Teen Spirit. I listened to this tape all summer, at cottage campfires until 3:00am, on road trips to my grandparents house in Rochester and on my walkman that played to fast sitting outside the convenience store all night drinking liter, glass bottles of Coke. The summer of '94 was one of the greatest summers of my life, it would be the last summer with no actual responsibility because I wasn't old enough to be forced to get a real job. I cut lawns all summer and made about a hundred dollars a week which when you were 14 in 1994 was the equivalent to a million dollars. I spent it all on food because I wasn't drinking, smoking pot or buying CDs (because I didn't have a cd player yet). I rode bikes all summer, went swimming and camped in my back yard as an excuse to wander around the neighbourhood all night with my friends. I wanted to have a girlfriend but I didn't get one until the fall when I entered high school, because I didn't want to date any of the 10 girls that I knew at the time.