On Missing the 90's

Maybe Not What You Think

The more tedious among us have the habit of affixing great importance to some decade of American life or another, usually the decade within which we “came of age”, whatever that means. For me, this is the 1980’s, a decade of incomparably good music, excellent movies, and inspirational politics, although the automobiles of the age tend to look like 21st century Russian Army infantry fighting vehicles. Outside of a few songs/bands that have been able to break through, and a love of classical music and opera that came late, I’m not sure I’ve acquired more than 5% of the music I like in the years since. Not wishing to be too hard on other decades, I think the 70’s were pretty damn good also.

I mention this because at this time in my life, I am generationally adjacent to a number of folks who “came of age” in the 1990’s, and unlike the 1970s (to which I am also generationally adjacent), I have little in common with or acquired from this decade. I stumbled upon this notion this morning when I read the tweet below

The New Yorker @NewYorker

From David Sedaris’s diary, September 9, 1985: “Ted H. is my painting teacher. . . . At the start of class he said that no question was a stupid question. So I raised my hand and asked if we could use part of the room as a smoking section.”

nyer.cmThe IHOP YearsLife at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the International House of Pancakes.

and then clicked through to read the New Yorker piece to which the tweet refers. I was mildly entertained by the diary entries of this (then) 27 year old man (7 years older than I) who was off to Chicago to study art as an undergraduate, but what I realized was that David Sedaris is a big time figure in American humor/culture whose rise onto the scene (in the 90’s) I completely missed. Same for his also apparently famous sister Amy, who I also sort of think I might recognize as famous, but whose work I have no real knowledge of.

In 2022 at the age of 56 and culturally aware, I OUGHT to know who David Sedaris is and what he is famous for. But before clicking this tweet, reading his diary entries, and then doing a little Wiki-stalking, I honestly hadn’t a clue. Then I started tackling the Googles and looking up the 1990’s (politics, events, pop culture, etc.) and realizing how little I had participated in it, before coming to a noteworthy conclusion:

I missed the 1990’s.

Not in the sense of being nostalgic, mind you. I simply just really didn’t process this decade, so much as I passed through it without acquiring any of it.

While I was chronologically “young” (24-34) during the years under review, I wasn’t living them as a young man. I married young as the 80’s ended and divorced young in 1993, the years in between blurred by too much Labatt Blue and the misplaced sense that I was entitled to a happy marriage without really working for one. I went to war and I tried to get the Navy to fund a career change (sending me to law school), but I came in fifth in a four horse race and so moved on after the end of my marriage to concentrating on something I was doing pretty well at the time, being a Surface Warfare Officer.

I stopped drinking (July 1, 1993 for those keeping track), I started getting an MA at night and then a War College diploma (I had homework for five years), I spent three years as Operations Officer on a cruiser and two as the speechwriter to the uniformed guy who runs the Navy (the CNO). I managed to fall in and out of love twice more before the decade was out (without benefit of clergy, thank goodness), and by the time I drove out to San Diego in the fall of 1999 to take over as XO of a ship, an entire decade had pretty much passed me by, culturally.

Friends? Seinfeld? Didn’t watch them.

Grunge? Nope.

I did manage to grab a little Alanis Morrisette, Dave Matthews Band, and Hootie and the Blowfish, but if you had asked me about “East Coast vs. West Coast” in those years, I would have assumed you were talking about weather or geography.

It isn’t just culture, or pop culture that I missed. Huge world events passed me by. I was only passably interested in the 1992/96 elections (very quietly political/conservative, but well-aware of the strictures against being public about it while in the Navy), I knew nothing about the Bosnian War except those things that were directly connected to the duties we carried out in the Adriatic on my ship, and I’m embarrassed to admit how many of these “90 Moments from the 90’s” mean very little to me. And while it happened in the 80’s, I was at sea for the runup to and fall of the Berlin Wall, so I missed that too.

I’m sure folks as tedious as I (there’s that word again), can and will rise to the defense of the 1990’s, and I’m just as sure that there is plenty good to defend. I’m just not aware of much of it. The bit of journaling I read from Sedaris (written in the 80’s…just sayin’) was sorta funny, self-indulgent and self-loathing as much journaling can be (or Substacking, for that matter), so I imagine as he hit his stride in the 90’s things got even better. Clearly David Sedaris is popular with New Yorker readers, and as I have (surprise!) culturally acquired a passing interest in reading the New Yorker in the 20’s, perhaps I’ll see more of him.

But I am content to leave the 1990’s be. You do you, younger members of Generation X (the best American generation, prove me wrong). I’ll take your word for it. I do wonder how much my situation is an outlier among the folks in my peer group who didn’t marry young and who didn’t spend a good portion of the decade at sea. Were you listening to Nirvana, watching the LA riots, and worshipping the Chicago Bulls? Or were you as numb to it all as I was?

I ask all this because I am—at least I think I am—far more aware of the events and pop culture of the past twenty years then I am of the 90’s (although I am blessedly immune to the current popular music scene). The internet must play a roll in this, but I have been far more plugged into the world around me than I was then. I think if I were to graph out interest vs time and plot politics, music, movies, television, and world events—you’d see a pretty steady band within which these would interact—but then all of them would take a big dip during the 1990’s.

Is this a common thing? Have many of you—in your busy lives—had this kind of experience—in any decade (don’t want to pick on the obviously sub-standard 1990’s)? Is this really important thing that I’ve spent the morning thinking and writing about, concluding that it was interesting and unique really just part of everyone’s life, and I’ve fallen victim to some kind of uniqueness bias?

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