Kevin Burdeshaw

Introductions.

My friends call me Burd.  It's an obvious choice for a nickname, and I've had it since I was in Elementary School.  It's a name that is as much a part of me as my brown eyes, pale skin, and the terrible tattoo on my shoulder.  It's a name with a history.  Not a well-known chronology by any means, but if you ask any of the 200+ friends I have about "Burd," they'll be able to recite a part of my narrative.  Often, with a smile or a grimace.

I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s.  The '80's being my most "formative" years.  That is when my adolescence began shaping me into the adult I am today.  I am from Generation X, the generation of people born anywhere from the mid/late 1960s to around 1980 or so.  It's a foggy timeline; nobody can seem to agree much on where most generations fall, but everyone agrees we're one of the smallest.  There are around 65 million of us in the United States, and that's smaller than the number of Millennials (72 million) and Generation Z kids (68+ million).  

We have also been described as unique, tough, and lost.

We were (by and large) a generation that saw less adult supervision than generations previous and after.  Mainly because economics demanded our mothers join the workforce.  The "Housewife" started becoming a thing of the past, and even the mothers who did stay at home often chased the kids out of the house while they cleaned and watched daytime television. There was no "Childcare" for us.  Daycare amounted to whatever you could find to occupy yourself with from sunrise to well after sunset.  While our Grandparents were best "seen and not heard" - we were best not seen.  Hell, they had television announcements when it got dark to ask our parents, "Do you know where your kids are?"

People called us latch-key kids because we often took care of ourselves and our siblings when our folks were off doing whatever it was they were doing.  We were cooking our own meals by 9/10 years old after arriving home after school, before our parents got off work. We were mowing lawns or running paper routes for extra dough on weekends, and we learned how to take a punch to the nose well before High School.  We understood a world of strife and dread much younger than what is considered "mentally healthy" nowadays, but we soldiered on.  We're pretty self-sufficient all things considered.

We played and cavorted outdoors, all the time.  The basal cell carcinomas I keep getting removed from my body are a testament to the sun-baked days of my childhood when you just had to get past that first sunburn, and everything was smooth sailing after that.  Our childhood was dirty and fun.  We built forts, drank out of old water hoses, swam and played in creeks, lakes, and quarries. We created neighborhood kickball tournaments, had dirt-clod fights with kids from other streets, and rode our bicycles off homemade ramps, usually made with the lumber we stole from construction sites.  We traveled far on those bicycles too, often miles on adventures, our parents not giving a second thought to our whereabouts or the mischief we were getting into (at least until dinnertime).  Boredom to us was nothing more than opportunity.

We were also a generation that straddled technology, and we've done it well, for the most part.  We are the generation that had to master numerous types of telephones (5 if I'm counting correctly) as well as computer, gaming, and automobile technologies that have evolved over and over in the last 5 decades. We operate digitally and in analog with equal proficiency. If our GPS fails, we can pull out a paper map and find our way (if no map is available, we're comfortable using our wits and intuition).  We don't eschew every new technological advance like our parents, on the contrary, we embrace it and keep moving forward.  Hell, some of us even invent this stuff.

We are a generation (the coolest of us anyways) that embraced Rock and Roll and what some of our elders (younger Boomer musicians - 'Sup Generation Jones!?) were doing with it.  We took various genres of Rock, Blues, Hip-hop, and Country, and mixed and matched them as we saw fit.  We pushed and pulled music and culture, blending art, fashion, and attitude into the everyday spectacle that is now viewed as normal.  Purple hair, nose rings, and tattoos??  Yeah, that was us.  We took our lumps doing it too.  Don't for one minute think that it was easy because it wasn't.  We have the scars to prove it, and you're fucking welcome!

We are also a generation that has seen our civil rights expanded and then constricted in a matter of decades.  We were the first generation to utilize birth control and take agency over our bodies, our women-folk were not brood mares for the State.  Some of us left behind the religion and politics of our parents that bade us hate and discriminate and fear that which was different. We (again, some of us) paved our own paths, diverging from our parents' antiquated views of the world and how they would have it.  We did the exact opposite of what people told us was proper.  If something (or someone) was different, disparaged, despised, or dejected, we gravitated to it.  We challenged ourselves and each other to disregard that which was considered decorous by the older more "white-bred"/prejudicial generations of America. Those abrogators that told us to "stay in our lane."  Well, we veered off that fucking lane into the wilderness and we did it with aplomb.  We created paths that became trails, and then roads, and are now well-traveled highways of culture. We understood the ugliness of the world and threw that ugliness back into the faces of its perpetrators. We were "Woke" before it had a name.

We came of age during Ronald Reagan and the end of the U.S.S.R.  We saw the hypocrisy of American Foreign policy and the destructive mythos and lies of the Cold War. We watched Reagan joke about Nuclear War and ignore an epidemic that killed tens of thousands of Americans.  Some of us screamed in outrage as that Cowboy wannabe started pushing us into an Oligarchy, although sadly, some of my generation also embraced it.  Not all of us are on the same page politically, but those of us who leaned into a progressive state of being never looked back.  We progressives were right too.  We've watched in horror as corporations kicked U.S. labor to the curb, shrinking the middle class and American prosperity (and promise) in the process.  We've experienced more (in terms of numbers mind you) downturns in the economy than any Generation previous to us. Our parent's middle class has dwindled, and prosperity is only available to the aristocratic class now.  We realized before most, that the "American Dream" was bullshit. We Progressive Gen Xers are also horrified by the religious intolerance and hate-mongering of our more conservative counterparts, but honestly, we warned everyone - we did, we warned you over and over and over.

The progressive, ethnically diverse, LGBT-loving, feminist, eco-warrior, alternative-minded, no-nonsense punk rockers and unconventional artists of Generation X, are my people.  My Tribe.  They are the cream of the crop of that time period, and they color all the stories I have.  Everything I have written starts and ends with them and the influence they had on my life and adventures.  The good, bad, ugly, funny, tragic, and beautiful are products of me, make no mistake, but the actions, and decisions I made (and continue to make) were colored by the people, places, and things I surrounded myself with.  My adolescence and the Tribe that adopted me made me who I would become.  My story is a little of their story.  This is what awaits you in the books I’ve written. So, if you're interested in a fun few reads while sipping your beverage of choice at the local coffee shop then buy one and dig in.  

If not, whatever, I don't really give a shit.  

I'm a Gen X'er, and mordant, hostile indifference...well, yeah, that was ours too.