Transcription
It is New Year's Eve, 1999. You didn't go to the do drop in with your friends, cuz Y2K is going to cause pandemonium. And you're prepared. You stocked up with food, toilet paper, milk, and eggs. You're ready. You pulled $40,000 in cash out of the bank two days before. It's in your sock drawer. 12:01, it happened. Midnight happens, and then 12:01, 12:02, you're looking out the window. All you see is fireworks. Well, that's normal. You wait up a while longer. You decide nothing's happening. You go to bed, figure you'll see it on the news in the morning. Morning comes, you turn on the news, and nothing happened. Just a few minor computer glitches.
Well, that really happened for those of you who lived through it. I think I was 34, 35 years old. I really wasn't worried, but there was that in the back of our mind that maybe something could happen. Power grids were supposed to go down. You know, none of that happened. The reason I bring up Y2K is because something did happen. Something you may not be aware of. Yeah, that is when everything started to change, folks. Everything. I mean, everything. If you think back before the year 2000, life was a lot simpler. People didn't start getting cell phones until about '98 to 2000. I got my first cell phone in the year 2000. I didn't get my first home computer until 1998, and it, it was worthless. Had a memory about this big, and you couldn't put one picture in it. A 110 megabyte hard drive, I believe. You couldn't do nothing, man. Nothing. Now you can fit the world's photo album on your home computer and still have room.
I tell you, where's my coffee? [Applause] [Music] Uh-huh. [Music] That's good. That's good. But our generation, my generation from, let's say, from 1955 to 1970, we got to experience something that anybody born after the year 2000, well, they're not going to get to experience. We got to experience many events. And I guess you could go back to somebody that was born in the '40s because, well, my parents are still alive. So they got to experience a lot of these things too, and maybe a little more. We seen the beginning of rock and roll. Yeah. Chuck Berry, Elvis, Little Richard. But we got to see them when they was in their prime as well. All the bands you see, some of these older bands are still playing, like the Rolling Stones. We got to see them when they, when they was the shizzle. Yeah.
Every city looked different. Now every city looks identical. You got the same stores. You got everything. Everything. You go to one city, you go to the next city, looks just like the city you were in before. It used to be you had mom and pop restaurants. You didn't have fast food on every corner. You had sit-down diners. They had the pickle on the plate. You know, that's how you know you ate at a good restaurant when they brought your sandwich, your, your BLT or your, your deluxe club, and it had the pickle, the dill pickle slice on the side. And then they bring you a glass of water too. That was, that was the best water ever, cuz it was free. Not now. You don't get no water. They ain't hardly have any sit-down restaurants. Walmart didn't have Walmarts. No, there was very few department stores. You had Sears. That was an adventure in itself going to Sears. They had the one we had had three or four floors, and then they had the candy shop in the middle. You'd smell that chocolate and look at it, and Dad go, "That's too expensive. We ain't getting any." And we didn't get any.
Then you had Kmart. Remember Kmart? It was a lot like Walmart, but it was nothing like Walmart. You go, "Hey man, go call, call somewhere else. I'm making a movie." I tell you what, this nature, I don't know about it. Where was I? Oh, yeah. Kmart. We'd go there about twice a month. And it was an adventure. It just something about Kmart. When you walked in, you started be, you started smiling. It was good. They had the cafeteria there. Yeah. You get you an icy, they had the popcorn. Soon as you walk in the door, the popcorn smell hit you. You knew you was in Kmart. And then, and then, you know, we would get in there, and there was, I had two brothers, my mom and my dad. We'd disperse. Mom and dad go one way, and us kids would probably go look at the toys or whatever, but we always knew it was coming, and we'd listen. There. Here it was. Pension Kmart shoppers. Your eyes got this big cuz we had a pocket full of allowance that we needed to spend, and we was waiting on that call. Blue light special. Today's special metallic trash cans, 99 cent. Look at my brother. Look at my other brother. You're looking, you can't see. You're looking up at the ceiling for that blue circular light going around. That's how you're going to hone in on it. You got to beat the other people up there cuz it only lasts 15 minutes, and that stuff's cheap, and there's a limit of two. You get up there, you're third in line. The people ahead of you seem to linger and take forever. But you've already got your eyes set on what you're getting. I go for the Hulk. Incredible Hulk trash can. That's going in my room. Yep. My other brother, he scans. He sees the $6 million man. Yep. The youngest brother. He goes for one. He goes for Arnold. No, not Arnold Schwarzenegger. He wasn't a thing in 1978. His has a picture of a child with a big old smile. And at the bottom it says, "What you talking about, Willis?" He had to have it. We tried to get him to put it down and at least get the, the chips one, you know? Same smile on the dude. No, he had to have, "What you talking about, Willis?" We meet up with our parents. We start to put those in our parents' cart. My dad looks at my little brother's trash can. He says, "Yeah, they didn't have Fantasy Island or nothing." No, he had to have that. He was always a weird little dude. Yeah.
But times were much better. Just things like that is what I remember. And I think when computers and cell phones came out, it just wiped everything out that we knew. And there were so many things we, you know, we got to experience life as a kid that they don't experience now. I mean, we were outside all day. Yeah. Went fishing, did, I mean, you had to make stuff up cuz there, you know, you didn't have all the computer games. You play baseball, football. You made things up and you stayed busy all day getting in a little trouble. There's a dog whimpering. But today, this is it. This is the life, man. I just wish they could. There just wasn't enough video made of those days. Yes, you can get on YouTube and you can see videos of the '70s, the '60s, but they're limited because film, uh, people just didn't film everything, you know, because film was expensive and not everybody had cameras. I wish I could have some of the home movies that we took as kids at the amusement park. And, uh, when my grandmother was, this was, I forgot to include this on the grandmother video when I made it a few weeks ago, but she actually would ride all the rides with us at the amusement park, and they had this giant slide that, you know, did this number. She gets on it, sliding down the slide, her head goes back, and her wig falls off. Man, she was embarrassed. And we did catch that on video, and somehow, somehow it disappeared. I only got to see that video once. I don't know if any of my cousins have it, but it, it existed, and then, uh, sometime before my grandmother passed away, it disappeared. Mhm. I know where it is, Grandma. Uh-huh. You, you recorded Murder She Wrote right over top of it because it was on a VHS.
Ah, what else? Man, it's just a whole lot different. But at least we got to experience life before it changed. And every generation changes, but ours changed drastically. I mean, we went from no computers to computers. But the nice thing is we also learned how to do these things. I don't know if that's a curse or not. We learned how to use computers. We learned how to use cell phones. Hey, I'm sitting here putting things on the computer on YouTube. Never would have, if you would have told me in 1983 that I would be sitting on my balcony making a movie and putting it out to the entire world, I wouldn't believe you. I would have laughed at you. And if you would have told me I was 59 years old when I was doing this, I'd have really laughed at you cuz I ain't looking my best like I did, you know, when I was younger. But you can do that today. And who knows what it's going to be like in 20 more years.
And let's see what else did I have. Jobs, you know, in the news. Back then, you would watch the news. News would come on what, 5:00? Wherever you lived, it was about 5:00, maybe 7 or something. I don't know when. I know where I was. And it came on at 5:00, but you could believe what they said. And it only came on once or twice a day. You didn't have it shoved down your throats 24/7 like we do now. Having news, and it's usually bad news, thrown in our face 24/7 doesn't improve the quality of our life. It just creates stress, worry. And I try to stay, you know, I, I do catch the headlines in the morning to see if anything's blown up or what's going on, any earthquakes, but other than that, I don't bury my head in it, you know. I stay away from it cuz there's nothing good about it. And I think we've always had crazy people. I think we've always had crime. We've always had a lot of the things, but the media makes it sound much worse than it is. And, and it probably is worse today. So really nothing. I don't know. You can, you can, you can say there's things good about today, and then you can say there's things good about the old days, you know, but that we don't have a time machine. We can't go back. We can only be happy that we lived those years, you know.
Uh, like music, like I said with the music, we got to see, you know, I wasn't around in '55, but 10 years later, the people that invented rock and roll, they were just getting rolling. So I got to see all that, and then I also got to see where rock and roll started to die. And I know you're going to say rock and roll will never die, but they're not playing it on the radios anymore, guy. I mean, I don't even know what's on the radio anymore. It's, if people even listen to it. I do. I got a little radio in my desk. I keep on real low playing classic. But we got to see those people in their primes and their watch their entire careers. And now it's kind of sad seeing them cuz they're old now. Those people that you grew up listening to, you know, they're old now, and they look old, and it's, well, it's because they are old, but it's kind of sad, and a lot of them are still staying out there doing it. I don't know how Mick Jagger does it. But who did I see yesterday that, oh, I was watching a video had John Goodman on there, you know, from Roseanne, and he was in the, the Big Lebowski. You wouldn't recognize that guy now, man. He lost all that weight, but he looks old. He don't even look the same. He sounds the same, but he don't look the same. And you know, get you to, we all age. We can't beat that.
What? I need a drink. Coffee. All right. That cloud's going that way, and then this one's coming this way. We had a big rain yesterday. It's just weird weather this year. Weird, weird, weird weather. Don't know. All right, guys. I guess that's it. I kind of butchered this video. I don't know. It's probably not that good. I couldn't put one up yesterday. YouTube is having glitches with my two big videos from the previous two days, and getting paid a cent, which is no big deal. I've done well this month, but it's always, it seems like there's always something going on with it. I would imagine it's pretty difficult to run an operation like YouTube. Billions of people watching every day. I mean, it's got to be an immense operation. But it's all good. We're back. I don't know if they fixed the problem, but I'm not going to sit around and wait. So, thanks for watching. Happy trails.