When you're young the idea of death from old age is completely intolerable. But what actually happens is that by the time you're old so much of your world has already passed on that you don't feel that you're going to be missing anything when you die.
Now I'm not ready to go, quite yet, but already a lot of what I loved as a kid is gone and not looking like it's going to come back anytime soon. I could be wrong since it seems every time something has been declared dead in the past, such as drive-in movies, convertibles, vinyl records, Westerns and Rock & Roll, it's come back with a vengeance. But because of technology, which isn't going to return to the days of analogue and vacuum tubes unless there's an nuclear device exploded in the upper atmosphere that fries the grid, some things held precious just a few decades ago seem like dinosaurs.
One of these lost things of my youth are, well, the dinosaurs. The ferocious T-Rex of Jurassic Park has now been turned into a large chicken, not a coward but the delicious bird of KFC fame, the lumbering Brontosaurs of King Kong now never existed at all and even the flying pterodactyl is something unrecognizable to most fourth grade boys. But it's not just the dinosaurs that have gone the way of the dinosaurs but also:
* Newspapers
* Political Cartoons
* Headphones with balance controls
* Drive-in movies
* CD ROMs
* Concert light shows
* Forbidden pornography
* Non-violent video games
* Heavy petting and "making out"
* School dances with live bands
* Miniature golf courses
* Neighborhood video arcades
* Minute Steaks and Whip & Chill
* Parks with duck ponds
* Free TV / trash pick up / drinking water
* Cars with loud (powerful) engines
* Affordable motorcycles
* Rock bands with personality
* Streets for cruising on "Cruise Night"
* Free Dial A Joke
* Safe sex
Once the "up" side; one thing from my childhood that actually has returned from the dead is Jack Box, the spokesman from the Jack In The Box TV commercials. Jack was the logo for the drive through restaurant in the Sixties where you gave your food order to a "Jack in the box" in the drive through but was literally blown up in a TV spot sometime in the 70s or early 80s but he's back now.
I met the real Jack once when I auditioned for a spot in a Jack In The Box TV commercial advertising Greek Salad (I had a big mustache at the time). The director of the commercials wears the Jack head and does his speaking voice. I asked him if anyone ever tells him he sounds just like Jack and he said he hears that all the time. It was only after I read a newspaper article about the ad agency a couple years later that my suspicion that he was Jack was confirmed. His head is a lot skinnier in person.
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