1967 was a great year for Wars.

In December 1967, smack dab in the middle of what would later be called “The Dark Ages,” not a lot was going on. The next year on the 27th you would get the Apollo 8 returning to Earth and those wily Chinese performing a nuclear test at Lop Nor PRC, whatever the hell that is. But on December 27th, 1967 the only item of interest was Dutch keyboardist Niels Meijer being born. And I don’t have to tell you what impact he had on the world.

The other item of interest, primarily to my parents, was my own birth. I don’t remember a lot about it, as I was very young at the time, ha-ha.

1967 was a strange time, from what I hear. Technically it was still the ‘60’s and all that came with it, but it was also the time when everyone was packing up and getting ready for the ‘70’s, like those people who leave a football game early so they can beat the traffic. The movie “In Like Flint (which didn’t have a lot going for it other than being Austin Powers’ favorite movie)” was released, Ernesto “Che” Guevara was put to death – with mixed emotions from t-shirt makers – and the first “Rolling Stone” magazine was published. A few places had a few wars and violent not-wars, Lyndon Johnson was President (and my mom hated him), and people rioted over a variety of things that I knew nothing about, although Niels Meijer may have known. Gas cost thirty-three cents a gallon and a movie ticket cost about a buck twenty-five.

The country had lost its collective mind a few years earlier when we entered Vietnam, and – to date – has never regained its sanity. These things, as I said, were completely lost on me for a very long time. Partly because I was a kid growing up without the Internet, and partly because, like everyone else, I was a complete moron.

My world was far simpler than the one that adults were forced to deal with, as is always the case. Adults had Vietnam, oil shortages, and the Cold War. I had cleaning my room, acne, and the Solid Gold Dancers. The toughest hurdle for a long time was being able to get up at midnight to watch Star Trek reruns with my dad. It was many years before the luxery of cable brought Star Trek at any hour of the day or night. Don’t take that for granted, kids. There was once a time when you had only four channels of shit to choose from, instead of four hundred channels of shit.

I can’t imagine what life was like for my parents. They both lived through the Great Depression, where people were eating ketchup sandwiches and glad to have them, as oppossed to the Great Recession we’re going through now, where people are able to protest economic hardships in thousand dollar tents and five hundred dollar coats. My mom was one of thirteen kids, but by the time she was married only four were still alive. Most died in childhood before they were old enough to complain about not being able to watch Star Trek. Shit was serious back then.

Even holidays were a whole different experience. Today as an adult the biggest problem with cooking a turkey is where to put leftovers. When I was a kid I remember my mom thawing an enormous carcus in the sink (just a chicken breast? Sure, find me a turkey that only grew a breast, Mr. Man of Tomorrow), then the endearing pleasure of plucking the little downy feathers out of its skin. I thought that was fun at the time. But when I got bored after plucking for about two minutes, my mom still had to pluck if for another half hour.

And that was even better than when she was a kid. They would bring a live turkey home, possibly one with a bad eye or a peg leg, and take it to the bac yard where grandad would lop its head off. Then he’d sit down and watch it run around the yard with no head, too stupid to realize it was dead. Eventually it would run out of steam and die, and he would toss it off to grandma to clean. Which, given my mom’s truly hosed up family at the time, meant grandma would have my mom clean it. And there was nothing clean about it. She would pull out the gross and smelly parts from inside, then pull all the feathers off. And this was before turkeys had been genetically engineered with zippers, kids of the future.

As a teenager I would get frustrated when it took a full minute to microwave a hotdog. Just shows you that, even as deprived as I was growing up, I was an asshat.