Dave Barry: Grown-ups used to have fun

Maybe you hate Dave Barry, but I thought this was outstanding and very relatable:

Dave Barry: The Greatest (Party) Generation - WSJ

I think ultimately, between the one-liners, the very valid point is that maybe there is a happy medium between the smoking, boozing, and carelessness of then and the obsessive helicoptering of today. And I don't think it's just 40 inches of, "In my day, our parents painted cribs with lead paint, and we turned out all right!"

By the standards of today, the main purpose of human life is to eliminate all risk so that human life will last as long as humanly possible, no matter how tedious it gets. . . . If you could travel back in time to one of my parents' parties and interrupt the singing to announce to the guests that shaking hands could transmit germs and therefore they should stop doing it, they would laugh so hard they'd drop their cigarettes into their drinks.

Anyway, a fun read with some points that parents will nod along with.

 

This quote caught my eye ...

For awhile there, this guy who lived in my hometown happened to be the richest man in my state. He had this big fine house on a fine piece of property, on which he also had his own personal three-hole golf course (maybe he should have practiced there more; years later, as a young hot-shot at the local two-bit country club, I relieved him of more than a few 20s). Hell, he even had a vacation home, on a famous PGA-tour-stop golf course. The house got written up in Southern Living back when Southern Living was to die for. So he was definitely a 1960s/1970s version of a 1-percenter.

But his kids went to the public schools. It wasn't that they were so good. It's just that nobody around there thought of doing anything different.

 

Hey, it looks like the Dancing Bear was invited to that party.

 

Actually, that's pretty much exactly what it is.

And, fuck him. One of the things I have no tolerance for is old windbags trying to grasp at relevance by telling me everything I'm doing as a parent is wrong.

And, he just assumes that everyone thinks drinking and smoking is fun, and the only reason it isn't done so much now is because it's "bad for you" and we're a bunch of pussies. Of course, he tries to illustrate that by overexaggerating some saucy and misconstrued anecdotes he heard on the "news."

It's no different than the blanket harrumphs issued by people who think life was absolutely perfect in the 1960s and any life improvement made thereafter is just a sign of weakness.

 

It was an entertaining column. And Dave Barry has never been one to find deeper meaning, but this is probably also related to our overscheduling. I don't remember ever having any kind of kid event that would have taken my parents away from a Friday or Saturday night of socializing, but nowadays I'm stuck at a field or a gym or a theater almost every weekend. Add in two working parents, etc. etc. etc.

But yeah the old days were some ragers. I remember my sister in high school going to a family party with my parents, and all three of them came home lit up. I don't know who drove home.

--A side note here, but I'm always amused when Barry tries to create this alternate path for himself that did not include the midlife crisis/infidelity/spousal trade-in of the early '90s. To read this column or much of his other work (particularly the CBS show purportedly based on his life story), you would think he settled into the boring 30s life the way most of us have. That is very much not the case, and that chapter of his personal life was tabloid fodder when it was happening. It does undercut his point a little bit here.

 

Why? Just because he's been married three times and is married to someone 18 years younger than him?

 

Also worth pointing out: it's fucking expensive to have a party every few weeks.

 

You're not truly having fun unless you blow cigarette smoke in your kids' faces and cheat on your wife at the office.

 

Smoking sucks.

 

I think the point is that there has to be some middle ground between that and the way it is now, where you become little more than a servant once you have children.

 

Has anyone suggested fish?

 

An ignorant and gross misrepresentation of what parenthood is and was.

You know why most people stop partying when they have kids? Because spending the most time as they can with their kids becomes what they love most in life. Fuck anyone who suggests some greater nobility in doing the opposite, or finding a 93Devillian "middle ground."