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The Naughty Naughties.

Okay, so, this week, as you may have noticed, we're doing posts on decades. Past decades. That's cool, it's not a future decade where I can go all Terry Pratchett on it and create some wonderous world that won't be anything like the decade will actually be like, but sure. In all honesty, I'm probably the least qualified person to tell you what happened between January 1st 2000 and December 31st 2009. I kind of drift through life in my own little haze. No drugs are involved, I just adamantly don't pay attention.

I can however, tell you in pretty good detail, the fads that gripped my specific generation year by year. Well, there won't be any months or some such, but you can work out the years from what I tell you.

The first fad that hit me, the first big obsession I ever had, and potentially that my generation as a whole had thrown at them, was Pokemon. I won't explain what Pokemon is because I don't need to. You know what Pokemon is. You probably caught more than me. But for what I lacked as a trainer, I gained in committment. I had games, cards, DVDs, cards, toys, cards tucked inside DVD cases, shiny cards that one day might actually be worth money, cards, cards held together in folders, cards held together by elastic bands, and more games. I recently bought one of the remakes of some of the older games. I think it was Heart Gold I bought. No longer being below the age of 15, I didn't have a fucking clue what I was doing.

Around the same time as Pokemon, but lasting a little while after, was professional wrestling. WWF (now WWE, just WWE) rather than WCW or ECW because those two were rubbish (as my beloved WWF would learn to it's downfall) and didn't have Stone Cold or the Rock or Mankind or the Undertaker or Rikishi or Kurt Angle and I could go on for so much more just naming guys I remember fondly. Well, Maybe not Kurt Angle. He was a douche. He's a good guy now, according to Wikipedia. My parents could never really understand why I liked wrestling, to them it was stupid, fake and essentially harmless. Sure, I can accept fake, but stupid and harmless? I'll not go on about the training those guys go through, and the defininite risk of injury those guys put themselves in, but I'm going to pick apart the stupid with one arguement. The way those wrestlers change their alliegences prepared me for high school better than anything. The way Lorna stopped talking to me and my friends after she got breasts and a boyfriend? Damn, that was JUST like what happened with Kane, Tori, and X-Pac. To put the wrestling fad into some kind of perspectave, I started watching just after the first Wrestlemania where the Rock and Stone Cold were in the main event and stopped around the invasion story line.

The next big obsession was music. I know, everyone likes music, but it takes a special kind of person to really get drawn in to music. I'm special. I can quite proudly say that I've never really stopped listening to any bands or styles, but just added more on. In 2001 Nickelback released their first single in the UK called How You Remind Me. Now then, the stuff I'd heard before was basically the stuff my brother listened to such as the Spice girls and Billy Piper (my mum does insist my brother is indeed a boy) and the stuff my mum listened to such as Rod Stewart, Brian Adams, and the Rolling Stones. When I first heard How You Remind Me it was like my eyes were opened. Opened wide, or so I thought. As I started exploring music, with the help of some teachers at school who turned out to be people too, but not just people, but music fans AND musicians, I found more similar bands to Nickelback, and from there older bands that are of a must hear nature such as Rage Against the Machine, Nirvana, and according to Mr Gillot, Dokken. But never satisfied with even these musical gems, I kept searching and found punk. That was something completely new for me, completely different to Nickelback, and it bourne a love of Ska, that turned into a love of Reggae, and eventually it lead me back into the world of punk in a kind of backwards circle, but this time the bands were more melodic about it. (Think The Starting Line and Simple Plan.)

There have been other trends. Trends I completely missed out on, trends I didn't care for, and trends I just plain didn't understand. There was one, that had spinning tops, and dragons, and god knows what else, but I was too old. And that is my curse, to always half remember these things. I look forwards to being old, and the grandkids visiting, and me sitting next to my wife talking half to the wife, half to the grandkids and half to myself (in my old age I won't be able to do Maths) and talk about what Pokemon were.

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