As a senior at NC State in the Fall of 1995, I wrote what vaguely passed as a humour column for the Technician, NCSU’s student newspaper. One day I’d love to do something like it again, but for now, like Charlie Brown’s Dad, posting them 10 years later is my form of sitting at the kitchen table, eating bran flakes and looking at old highschool yearbooks
These columns have been preliminarily reproduced here in original form. Printed, they make great bathroom reading material. I recommend HP Glossy Paper. Less chafing.
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We here at Jay’s Corner, fresh from a complimentary week of training at the Ricki Lake Institute for Advanced Psychobabble Studies, have decided to make this week Advice week. So, in the spirit of the very foundation for the Institute, we have decided to pull a fictitious letter out of the Jay’s Corner mailbag (We couldn’t afford to pay the group of Transvestite Stewardesses Who Stole their Niece’s Husbands and The Women Who Love Them, so Milo typed something up real quick).
Dear Jay, I’m feeling full of all this Generation X angst. I’m really afraid that I’m going to spontaneously combust.
Signed, Kurt is Dead, and I Don’t Feel So Good Myself.
Gentle Reader, you threw me for quite a loop. I wasn’t exactly sure what angst was until I ate 5 taco supremes from the campus Taco Bell. Rest assured dear reader that I feel your pain (not to mention a number of other feelings most associated with the color green and/or Carolina blue).
I do feel that your anguish stems from a repression and denial of what is at the very center of your being, that which drives your emotions, that which, as my great-Grandmother used to say, “stirs your gizzards” (and I don’t mean those 5 taco supremes from the campus Taco Bell).
You’re in denial of your Inner Eighties.
Now I know, dear reader, that this must come as quite a shock. But the Eighties represented the television, the music, the times that shaped our lives — not to mention the last time the Yankees won a World Series. I know that if you dig deep down, you will admit that you really miss Willis, and Tootie, and Alex P. Keaton. I know that you secretly long to have a problem that no one else can help you with, and that if you could find them, you would hire the A-Team (I especially miss that one crash scene with the car flipping over, the same one they played over and over again every week). And I know, dear reader, you really miss “Moonlighting,” and the time that Buckwheat got shot. Go ahead, let your inner Max Headroom b-b-b-b-breathe.
Of course that’s not all, that which really stirs your gizzards is the Eighties music. I know you want to Jump, and do the Safety Dance. I know that you have that Thriller album sitting in the bottom of the milk crate holding up your shelves in your room. And what about those glam posters of Duran-Duran and/or Twisted Sister that you had in your room? Dust off those Talking Heads records and repeat after me:
Into the blue again/after the money’s [once the Trustees raise our tuition] gone
Once in a lifetime/water flowing underground.
Same as it ever was…
Same as it ever was…
Same as it ever was…
Now that you know, and, of course, knowing is half the battle, I really feel that you will not spontaneously combust. In fact, I am assured by the Fire Marshall that you won’t spontaneously combust, nor will your fire extinguisher. I know this, because a co-worker showed me the other day (I’m not making this up) that the fire extinguishers in our building have large yellow 3×5 stickers with the words “Non-Flammable” on them.
I feel protected. Feel secure. Feel good. Go watch “Growing Pains.” Go listen to Dire Straits.
Jason Young is a Senior majoring in Couch Potato Management. He’s currently studying the differential equations of Ruffles Ridges. By the way, has anyone seen my remote?
