And that leads us to “who gets published in the media/lifestyle journalism world?”. It’s often very sheltered, middle-upper-class people, ie the last people you’d expect to be able to tackle real issues.
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…except they have money to spend on lifestyle products.
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Free samples are supposed to be part of the gig, though. Remember the mattress bloggers.
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I didn’t know the guy, but another student in my high school died in a car crash. And I was in and out of hospitals starting as a kid.
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I forget, who were all those people who died of AIDS in the '80s and '90s
By 1993, AIDS had become the leading cause of death among persons 25 to 44 years old
http://hivinsite.ucsf.edu/InSite?page=kb-01-03
about half that group was “Generation X” 
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as a full-blown Gen-Xer, i don’t know where this guy is coming from. we’ve always known that life is nasty, brutal, and short. i was hoping he was at least going to mention that something like 19% of all strokes occur to people who are UNDER 55 (and that percentage is increasing), but alas, that was not the point of his article.
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I don’t recall ever watching 90210 (at least not intentionally), but I did see Buffy the Vampire Slayer in theaters, and he was well-known enough by then that it was notable. Not as famous – or funny – as Paul Reubens, of course…
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i’m afraid to ask what the whole “tunnel” bullshit is about…
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Someone saw an old telecom map or something? The internet is a series of tubes after all.
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It starts with the underground tunnels\bunkers under DIA.
And then they naturally connected them to Cheyenne Mountain.
From there, why not connect the rest of enclaves.
Obviously an old map as Austin, TX is not included
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His death stemmed from something medical that can happen to any of us, but surely would evade us, because these kinds of things don’t happen to us, do they?
As someone younger than Luke Perry who has nearly died because of “something medical”… yes. Yes they do.
No, they happen to people our parents’ ages or our grandparents’ ages.
I don’t know how old (or young) he thinks GenXers are, but I’m a GenXer and my grandparents were Austro-Hungarian subjects. There aren’t many people their age still alive, period, anywhere in the world.
We are immune to health scares because we are still young, forever teenagers.
Funny, I’ve felt like I was 40 ever since I was 18 or so.
We’re beginning to reach ages when we really need to start taking care of ourselves, while the memory of carefree insolent youth hovers over us like a mocking shadow.
Sounds like a trust fund kid to me.
Perry’s death is a warning that we are adults who are not immune to the health issues that we never imagined could affect us.
Again, yes we did imagine this could affect us. We pretty much all did.
His death is a loss for everyone, but it cuts even deeper because he was an anti-hero for our generation before we entered the real world.
To be honest, I never watched that show. I don’t watch much television now, and back in those days I watched even less. I certainly didn’t watch 90210, nor did I know anyone who would admit to watching it. “An anti-hero for our generation” is a bit of a reach.
I know what he’s trying to do. He’s trying to say that nobody’s ever really too young to die of “something medical” and that we should always try to take care of our health. But it’s really patronizing to assume a) that we 40-60-somethings don’t already know that, b) that every single GenX experience was the same, and c) that quintessential GenX experience was growing up into a sheltered life in the New Jersey suburbs*. His heart is in the right place, but for the love of Christ he should be just a wee little bit less patronizing, because he’s coming across like an idiot.
*Yes, I googled him, but I’m not going to dox him.
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It was almost as terrible as when Kurt Cobain committed suicide, remember how that defined us as a generation?
“Well, his impact is huge. Any time pop culture people, or even scholars and whatnot, talk about the American Gen X generation, or the Gen X generation worldwide even, Nirvana is not far away from that discussion.”
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Oh man. Both me and my brothers all hated Nirvana [ducks]. When Cobain died, we all said to each other, “Shit. Now he’s going to be deified and never go away.”
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Can’t tell if sarcastic or not.
It wasn’t exactly defining for me, but I’d be lying if I said it had no impact.
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I actually had no idea who he was when he died, and all the commentators were like, “Gen X weeps; it’s like when John Lennon died, only for Gen X.” I like Nirvana now but he definitely was not important to me before he died and very few people my age particularly followed his music.
At least I knew who Luke Perry was, but I didn’t have any pages from Tiger Beat magazine thumbtacked to my wall or anything.
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the thing for me about being Gen-X as a music listener is, both Lennon and Cobain were very large impacts on me. Lennon because jesus, he was LENNON, and Cobain because everyone dreaded it was coming and it was so awful when it actually happened. love or hate Nirvana, it’s definitely worthy of being a generational touchstone.
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I watched it for a bit at the beginning. My vague memories of it are that it seemed like a fun teen show at first, but only for a few episodes. Pretty soon it became a blatantly obvious ‘cause-of-the-week’ show. Every episode had someone getting abused, getting an STD, getting cancer, or getting addicted to drugs or something. The irony there is that, if anything, kids who grew up watching that show should expect young people to have health problems and/or die since so much of the show was about that sort of thing.
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That is such an interesting observation. The conversation around generational pop-culture shibboleths always seems to center around what was being produced at the time (which is fair), but this got me thinking about what I was actually listening to at the time, and those aren’t necessarily the same things.
In 1989 I was as much or more into the music and style of 1969 than what was coming out at the time. Hendrix, The Doors, Janis Joplin. Led freaking Zeppelin (of course)! And John Lennon, too (although I wasn’t as impressed with the Beatles per se, for some reason). I mean, I was listening to contemporary stuff, as well, but there was definitely a swath of popular music that just didn’t float my boat, mostly because it was popular music, I suspect.
As for Kurt Cobain, I was, almost entirely by happenstance, an early adopter of both Nirvana and Pearl Jam. I played Nevermind over and over when it first came out because it so obviously ROCKED, somehow, without either the glam of Hair Bands or the burnout-vibe of Heavy Metal. It was such a good album. And then they blew up, as did PJ1, and I got so sick of hearing them both on the radio and on TV all the time; I still liked them, but I wasn’t invested in the same way once the mass media got hold of that whole “grunge” thing. 
It sucked when he killed himself, but I wasn’t too shook-up about it. In the vein of gen-x’ers being familiar with morbidity: dying young and tragically was a pretty rock-n-roll thing to do (see also, not coincidentally: Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison, and Lennon). I think it was probably a bigger deal for X’ers who are a few years younger than me, by which I mean those who first encountered Nirvana in their high-school years (or a bit earlier) rather than after. There really is something about the music of your adolescence that sticks with you.
1. Fun Fact: My one and only Pearl Jam show was at a mini-music-festival held on a relatively nearby campus. It was a free/very-cheap concert aimed at students, and the school had booked them when nobody knew who they were, but by the time the show rolled around they were huge, so it was kind of a madhouse. I had a friend who was from Lawrence, and so a few of us thought it’d be fun to drop acid and go to Day on the Hill (as it was called). Hijinks ensued. 
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i’ll add Bonham to your list of “gone too soon,” and also Tommy Bolin, T. Rex, etc etc etc.
i was into the beatles and especially lennon because my older (boomer) siblings were. lennon always appealed to me for his political stances and his puckish streak, and he was JUST coming out of his self-imposed retirement/house-dad phase when he was killed. there was almost nobody i know of any age who wasn’t seriously stunned and shaken by his death. and then cobain, yeah, the music came seemingly out of nowhere, and it clearly was fresh in the way that punk felt when it first appeared. but he was clearly so self-destructive, and by then i was much more aware of how those things could play out. anyway. yeah, interesting how things go.
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