The stories in this collection have been seen elsewhere, I must admit. Early, less refined versions of the first half were released in a self-published book in 2011 for which I’d sent the wrong version to the printer, which was fun (if you like a lot of typos). Then I started uploading rewritten versions on Substack during the pandemic, you know, just in case. And now, I’m putting them here, safe and warm on my own website where somebody might fall into them by mistake if they’re online and looking for information on author M.K. Lobb or filmmaker Curt Lobb. (PS I’ve had worse ideas)

My name is Randall Lobb and I am a writer/director/producer and if anybody knows my name, it’s probably because they saw one or more of the feature documentaries I made: Turtle Power: The Definitive History of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Power of Grayskull: The Definitive History of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, The Crystal Calls: Making Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance or A Gamer’s Journey: The Definitive History of Shenmue or because they’re waiting for me to finish A Riddle of Steel: The Definitive History of Conan the Barbarian or Turtle Power II: Evolution, Mutation & Reboot. (for which I am also waiting. Impatiently.)

However, there is a whole other group of people walking around in the world who know of me because I taught them English or Media in high school (including my own biological children, one of whom has gone viral several times because of it…)

FYI she didn’t go viral just because I couldn’t refrain from going for that joke. You can look her up, she’s got a lot of other stuff going on.

Yeah. So, years ago, I fell into teaching in a way that is absolutely worth reading about because it is both impossible and happened, but that will come in a subsequent story.

For the purposes of this taut intro, suffice to say that I began my improbable teaching career as, so I was told, the only film school grad to apply to an Ontario teacher’s college and I was therefore, a young teacher breaking new trail in almost every way.

Again, there’s another set of stories in that, but fast forward to me already a high school teacher in rural Southwestern Ontario after being hired immediately out of college because I had acquired a reputation for (in the exact words of my first student teacher appraisal) “creating an unreal rapport with students”. In a good way.

From my first year of teaching on, I became known as an expert in student engagement which, at that time, was becoming increasingly critical.

In 1989 there emerged a fresh cohort of complicated kids that the frustrated Boomers running the education system felt were slipping away not only from them but from education itself. And guess what? The Boomers were at least half-right.

This new cohort of students, born in the 80s, were aggressively unlike the generations before them. And particularly unlike my generation (born after the mid-60s) this new cohort was not nearly so willing to sit back and shrug everything off whilst the Boomers tried to push them around or force them to smarten up and read King Lear.

Amongst a million other things.

These days, much has been said about what we now know as Millennials, including: they ruined coffee (under roasting, over-pricing), facial hair (unironic moustaches, 90s mullets), ice cream (olive oil and goat cheese as an actual flavour), music (boy bands, girl bands, Napster) and personal finance (avocado toast), but I have a wider view.

Perhaps a much more charitable view.

Teaching these people from the moment they hit puberty, trying to get them to read Macbeth or Who Has Seen the Wind, struggling to convince them to use technology and then desperately struggling even more so to prevent them from using technology, all of these things and so many more that I had to do taught me not just about them.

It taught me about myself, and about the people with whom I grew up.

And more specifically, it revealed much about when I grew up and what that meant.

That’s when I started writing all this. After I realized how different I was from these 80s-born kids.

In light of that learning, what follows is a collection of autobiographical stories – mostly funny – in which I will show you a world that was, a world now long gone and fading faster every year, the dark and creepy world of the 60s, 70s and 80s as seen through the eyes of a strange little boy born in 1965 in the middle of nowhere.

The world as it was for me, G1, Generation X.

And although demographics really isn’t everything, it is definitely something.

Because hey, if you can’t remember enough about your childhood to enjoy your own nostalgia, you can enjoy mine, because I remember all of it, exactly the way it happened. Pretty much.