Xennial Memories

• tight jeans with ripped knees
• denim jackets (I had a white one in high school, and a girl who had mistakenly thought I was creeping on her tried to bite me through it; I never got her lipstick out of it)
• friendship bracelets
• open flannel shirts over band t-shirts
• Chuck Taylors
• Doc Martins
• thrift-store and military surplus wear

• Satanic Panic!!1bbq
• Tipper Gore and her fellow DC yentas creating the PMRC because lyrics in songs like “Under The Blade” and “Darling Nikki” turned them on — only to get rhetorically pimp-slapped in national TV by Frank Zappa and Dee Snider.
• 2 Live Crew being sued over “Hairy Woman” (a parody of “Pretty Woman”) and setting a precedent that parodies were protected speech
• TV violence
• violence in video games like Doom and Mortal Kombat
• kids being able to get issues of Playboy or watch softcore porn on cable TV (HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, or the Playboy Channel)
• Joycelyn Elders losing her job as Surgeon General for suggesting that teenagers be taught that masturbation is safe sex when everybody was pushing abstinence as a prevention strategy for HIV and teen pregnancy

• discovering the New Wave of British Heavy Metal ten years too late
• Thrash Metal
• thrash metal
• hair metal
• prog metal
• new wave
• Psycho kitty, Qu'est-ce que c'est?
• discovering progressive politics via progressive rock after listening to Queensrÿche's Operation: Mindcrime, Body Count's “Cop Killer", and “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” by the Dead Kennedys
• nostalgia for late 60s/70s acts like Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience
• being into heavy metal when your classmates were getting into Seattle grunge (Nirvana, Pearl Jam, etc.) and “alternative rock"
• buying secondhand Blue Öyster Cult and Black Sabbath tapes with money I earned picking up used cans and bottles and returning them for a nickel each
• discovering the works of Michael Moorcock through Blue Öyster Cult songs like “The Great Sun Jester", “Black Blade", and “Veteran of the Psychic Wars"
• getting over suicidal thoughts because songs like Metallica's “The Unforgiven” and Slayer's “Seasons in the Abyss” made me feel seen
• making mix tapes by recording songs off the radio or off of CDs
• having my first kiss and losing my virginity while listening to Type O Negative's October Rust (it was her choice; she wanted it darker, and I didn't mind one bit)
• having the batteries in your Walkman run dry before you get home
• having your Walkman eat a tape
• thinking that Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera is romantic because you don't yet realize that the Phantom is an incel and rapey as fuck (and Raoul isn't much better)
• Billy Joel dropping “We Didn't Start The Fire"
• Alleged subliminal messages encouraging suicide in heavy metal songs by Judas Priest and Ozzy Osbourne, as if any band wants their fans killing themselves (dead guys won't buy albums, merchandise, or concert tickets)

• Masters of the Universe, Transformers, M*A*S*K, and lots of other toys — each with their own Caturday morning cartoon series to serve as an informercial as if that fooled watchdog groups focused on advertising aimed at children
• four basic Lego lines: town, castle, space, and Technic (I had mostly space stuff)
• Nintendo vs Sega arguments (as if it mattered when you played what your parents gave you)
• subscribing to Nintendo Power to get a free copy of Dragon Quest (originally released in the US as Dragon Warrior)
• renting Nintendo games at the local video store (and calling them tapes instead of cartridges)
• trying to beat a game during a weekend rental period even though it had save files because somebody else might rent it and overwrite your file
• PC RPGs like Wizardry and Ultima ported to the NES and simplified for the relatively weaker hardware
• losing your progress in a game because you had messed up the password that represented your progress
• figuring out grids and coordinate systems because drawing passwords to NES Mega Man games was a pain in the ass
• discovering Isaac Asimov's robot stories via introductory cutscenes in Mega Man X.
• experimenting with Game Genie codes to hack NES games released after the manual had been printed
• playing Final Fantasy II and Final Fantasy III and being exposed to existentialism and the concept of war crimes
• not knowing that FFII and FFIII on the Super NES were actually FFIV and FFVI until after FFVII came out on the PlayStation.
• seeing Final Fantasy VII advertised on MTV

• Apple IIs and Commodore 64s in elementary school computer labs
• Learning WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS as “computer literacy” in high school, and having to figure out how to fix AUTOEXEC.BAT because another student had modded the file so they could play shareware copies of Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, or Duke Nukem 3D in class.
• writing my first stories on a secondhand Smith-Coronoa electric typewriter
• DOS for Dummies
• proprietary file formats
• discovering (BSD) UNIX in a college computer lab full of SPARCstations
• building my first website on sites like Geocities, The Globe, Tripod, or Angelfire and making it about vampires and heavy metal because that's what I was into at the time
• spanning ZIP archives across multiple floppy disks and hoping like Hell that you had numbered them correctly because otherwise you'd be unable to unzip the archive
• being asked “A/S/L?” in chatrooms and on forums
• knowing never to provide your real name or real-world contact info online
• "Internet: Serious Business™"
• media scaremongering about kids wandering into AOL chatrooms called “TV chat” expecting to talk about Barney and finding out that it's for transgender people and cross-dressers because TV stood for “transvestite"

• Omni magazine
• Epic Illustrated (Marvel's answer to Heavy Metal and Metal Hurlant)
• Reading Dune as a kid after seeing the David Lynch movie and not really getting it at first, but knowing that it was still fucking cool
• Stephen King: Carrie, It, Firestarter, The Tommyknockers, The Dark Tower
• Clive Barker: Cabal, The Hellbound Heart, The Damnation Game, Imajica
• Michael Moorcock: Elric, Corum, Hawkmoon, Von Bek, Oswald Bastable, Jerry Cornelius, Gloriana; or, The Unfulfill'd Queen, The Brothel in Rosenstrasse
• reading C. J. Cherryh's Morgaine Saga because my first girlfriend gave me her copy and insisted it was romantic (Morgaine's not bad; she's just drawn that way and really needed a hug)
• C. S. Friedman's Coldfire Trilogy
• Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles and Lives of the Mayfair Witches
• Poppy Z. Brite
• Glen Cook's The Black Company
• Eric Van Lustbader's Sunset Warrior (pastiches on Moorcock?) and The Ninja
• James Clavell's Shogun
• Roger Zelazny Chronicles of Amber
• Isaac Asimov's robot stories and Foundation
• Robert Heinlein: Starship Troopers, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Time Enough For Love
• The Death & Return of Superman
• Neil Gaiman's Sandman
• Watchmen and V for Vendetta
• Preacher
• actually reading Playboy for the articles because unlike Hugh Hefner I didn't have a taste for blondes (being a bastard, I prefer brunettes)

• cursive writing
• long division by hand
• being forced to try to write with your dumb hand because you're left-handed and the teacher thinks you're a natural born warlock (joke's on her; I am a warlock and my computer is full of daemons)
• adults encouraging bullying because it kept the weird kids in their place
• being able to deck a bully without getting arrested
• being put in a gifted & talented class by mistake because you had taught yourself to read before kindergarten
• being labeled “emotionally handicapped", and knowing you've been labeled thus, because God forbid a kid get angry at anybody, for any reason
• having to see a school shrink because you had said in anger that you'd rather fall on your own sword than go to school, and having the staff freaking out over what books you have been reading or TV/movies you had been watching that might have “put that idea into your head” (spoiler: it was Bulfinch's Mythology)
• substitute teachers playing movies like The Neverending Story or Fantastic Voyage in elementary school
• hitting puberty and realizing what Van Halen meant when they wrote “Hot For Teacher” (I was jealous of my music teacher's cello, and wished she'd wrap her legs around me instead)
• getting hard and leaking a little when the school nurse cups your balls as part of a routine exam, knowing you're being low-key molested, and wishing she'd do more because she's kinda hot and you haven't had a chance to jerk off in weeks
• being called a homo for years because you once got a boner in the locker room after swimming lessons
• being accused of “sexual harassment” because I told a girl who had been bullying me to go fuck herself
• seeing Columbine happen and realizing you might have done the same at your school if your parents had had firearms in the house, though in my case the media might have tried to blame Final Fantasy and the Blue Öyster Cult instead of Doom and Marilyn Manson

I had written in greater detail about my complex school years in Veteran of the Psychic Wars (2000)

• Knight Rider
• Airwolf
• The Fall Guy
• Alien Nation (my mother had a shit hemorrhage when she saw me watching the TV series; thought it was too mature for me)
• 21 Jump Street
• A Nightmare on Elm Street
• The Lost Boys
• Conan the Barbarian
• Conan the Destroyer (I first saw it as a little kid, but after puberty that scene where Grace Jones suggested grabbing and taking a man one wanted had me thinking, “Yes, please.")
• The Terminator
• They Live
• Big Trouble in Little China
• Monty Python
• Absolutely Fabulous
• watching Jeopardy! and knowing most of the questions
• “Politically Incorrect” with Bill Maher
• The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai
• Robocop
• Spaceballs
• The Crow (knowing that Bruce Lee's son Brandon died during filming)
• Gremlins
• Beetlejuice
• Critters
• Killer Klownz from Outer Space
• The Last Starfighter
• Highlander
• Nightbreed
• Hellraiser
• Doctor Who (Tom Baker)
• Voltron
• watching the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice with my first girlfriend and having a fight because she admitted having a crush on Colin Firth but was upset that I found Jennifer Ehle attractive (then again, she was into Type O Negative but gave me shit for being into Iron Maiden because she thought they were too theatrical — and this was the same girlfriend who introduced me to C. J. Cherryh)
• Robotech (my mother had another shit hemorrhage when she walked in on me watching this because it had a shower scene that really wasn't any spicer than a typical 1980s shampoo advert where the actresses always seemed practically orgasmic)
• seeing real anime like Akira and Vampire Hunter D on the Sci-Fi Channel
• Star Trek: The Next Generation

• Mary Tamm as Romana in Doctor Who (she knew how to put Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor in his place)
• Pat Benatar
• Elvira, Mistress of the Dark
• Marina Sirtis in Star Trek: The Next Generation
• Sarah Brightman
• Ashley Laurence in Hellraiser
• Grace Jones
• Tina Turner
• Julia Sawalha as Saffron in Absolutely Fabulous
• Elisabeth Bathory (hey, this was long before Lenore & Hector in Castlevania)

• Getting tossed out of the house on a nice day and being told not to come home before dark
• Riding my bike down to a corner deli to get my mother cigarettes
• Keeping a couple of quarters in my pocket for the pay phone in case I change my plans
• Having to remind people at the public library that I am in fact capable of reading books from the adult section despite being nine years old
• Renting horror movies and having to convince the clerk that my parents are OK with it
• Coming home from school to an empty house and having my homework done before my parents get home from work
• Working illegally for my father at 12 as a barback for a cut of his tips so I could buy books and music
• Getting a pack of condoms for my 13th birthday and being told that I'm welcome to bring girls home
• Being sexually assaulted by three girls and being told by adults that they were doing me a favor
• Walking out of a party where other kids had started drinking at midnight and not getting home until dawn because I had to walk home while finding my way in the dark
• Skipping prom to work overtime at the supermarket and get paid time and a half so I could afford to see Iron Maiden, and then spending the night playing Final Fantasy
• Risking my life by riding a bicycle to work and school on roads without bike lanes where drivers routinely exceeded posted speed limits
• Riding several miles to a record store in another town to pick out a single album on CD
• Having to take care of my mother while my father was working after a fall from a commuter train left her crippled and suffering from clinical depression
• Having to tell my father that no, I don't want a hooker on my eighteenth birthday, just because I didn't date in high school after years of being told that I should keep it in my pants to avoid becoming a father too young like my old man did
• Buying my first computer for $50 when I was 18 and finding out that it had nothing installed but DOS, and figuring out how to install a CD-ROM drive so that I could install Linux instead