When I was eight years old, the world was at my doorstep. I went to parties and drank beer until I passed out. People offered me pot, which I gratefully refused. I read Playboys calmly in my living room as Drew Barrymore called me up to ask what kind of "Underoos" I wanted her to wear tonight.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not lying about any of this. (Well maybe about Drew Barrymore - but she should have called, damn her.) I did pass out from too much drinking when I was eight, I had turned down several joints, and I did read dirty magazines in the living room with my mother there.

But it's not like I was swinging with a crowd of nine year-old alcoholics, going from club to club with our fake I.D's ("I'm a midget, I tell you! A midget! Now let me drink!"), leaving generous tips of Monopoly play money and chocolate gold doubloons.... no.

I was a seventies kid. I'm not unique.

And that's the reason I think the kids of the 1990s have to get together and have a good talk right now.

Y'see, I grew up in the 1970s, which is a good thing. (If I had grown up in the sixties I'd be named something dippy like "Driftwood".) The seventies were like a big hangover from the days of the sixties - you ever wake up in the morning with a huge hangover and go, "My God! What was I thinking, last night? Did I actually go shopping naked? Maybe I'd better cut down for a while...."

That was the seventies. People did so many drugs in the sixties that after a while, even they couldn't believe what they were doing. Around 1975, people started coming to and realizing that they'd worn the same dashiki for the last four years and that "I am the Walrus, I am the Eggman" had actually made sense to them. You can make fun of 1970s polyester leisure suits and disco dancing, but compared to Haight-Ashbury and the Strawberry Alarm Clock, it seemed positively rational.

So, naturally, as people tried to recover from the sixties, their main question was: "What was I thinking? Why the hell did I do that?"

Bingo! Next thing you know, everyone was analyzing themselves and trying to find who they were.

And while all the parents were so busy trying to find who they were, they kind of forgot to check up on what the kids were becoming.

So during this wild and untamed period, children ran free.

My uncle, who was the perennial seventies' man - he actually rode a mechanical bull - loved me very much. And because of that he took me along to every party he went to, simply because he hated to leave me behind. So there I was - in an undersized polyester disco suit, made especially for me - wandering around curiously as people funnelled entire kegs down their throat. And it's a basic fact of human nature that when partygoers see something small and cute wandering through a party, be it a cat, a dog, a small child, they feed it beer.

And the great thing is that, when you're an eight-year old kid, everyone gives you beer for free just to see your reaction. (I still long for those days.) I used to drink thirteen kid-sized Budweisers a night and pass out in the corner. Right next to my uncle.

As for the marijuana, I had an aunt that was a relic from the "Free Speech, Free Love, Free Drugs" period and still smoked a lot of ging. Of course, at the age of eight I had no idea what drugs were - I mean, I'd seen the packages in the cupboard but I thought they were oregano. But one day I'm ruffling through the cabinets and I see that it's all rolled up into these little cigarettes; and I may be a dumb kid, but by God I know you can't put these things into spaghetti sauce. So I pick up a handful and run in to ask my Aunt.

"Why, that's mary-jew-wanna," my Aunt said serenely, sitting cross-legged on the porch. "It's a drug."

She leaned in eagerly, hoping to give her nephew a new experience. "Why, would you like to try some?"

I froze. I knew what mary-wanna was - it was an illegal substance. Safetypup, the cartoon dog on the side of my chocolate milk cartons, had lectured me on the dangers of mary-wanna many times - and if you can't believe an anthropomorphic bassethound in a trenchcoat, who can you trust?

I turned her down, trembling in fear.

"Okay," she said with all the casual elegance that only a stoner can posses - and lit up in front of me.

I ran out of the room.

I never went back to The Cabinet again, but each time I went to my aunt's house I lived in terror that she might offer it to me again. Because when you're eight years old, you know that the cops are out there.

You see, not having a lot of real-life experience, a young child raised in the suburbs naturally assumes that all the authority figures are like the ones he already knows: His mom and his teacher.

And they're everywhere.

Think about it. Your mom wakes you up and she drops you off at school, where your teacher takes over. Your teacher spends most of the day watching you, and maybe you get an hour where you're kinda free on the playground - and that gets horrible sometimes. Playtime is when the bullies come out. But even then the teachers are a good solid scream away, and soon enough you're inside school again. Then you go back home. More mom. Mom tucks you into bed. Then she wakes you up again.

Being a kid is kind of like being in prison, except the guards are nice and give you candy.

So you figure that it's the same when you grow up. You go to work, and the cops are there watching you just like your teachers. During the day when you're at school, tides of policemen cover the streets, checking every nook and cranny to make sure that everyone's Doing Okay. A couple at every office, just walking the beat. They talk to everyone, maybe two or three times a day. Just to see how you're doing. You know.

I mean sure, you don't see all those cops a lot at night, but heck, that's when mom's there. Who needs cops?

So of course when my aunt told me she had marijuana, I thought this was like hiding Anne Frank. It never occurred to me that maybe the local policement didn't rummage through her cabinets once or twice a year just to see what was there. I was sure she'd get caught. They had to know, right?

Every time we got alone for five seconds I was terrified she might just offer it again.

I began to have nightmares where a seventeen foot-tall aunt burst into my room, thrust a poisonous joint the size of a baseball bat down my throat and began screaming, "Smoke it, you little bastard! Smoke that damn thing and feel the fumes of eeeeevil!"

Eventually I started avoiding her, going out of my way at parties to avoid being alone with her. At around age eleven she stopped offering.

It's a shame. At age twelve I would've taken her up on it.

And as for the Playboy subscription: My father was always very open-minded, taking pride in the seventies' ideal of Being Open With Your Kids. When most parents were stammering to their kids, trying to explain how a baby bird comes from its mommy, my dad was sitting there with a flowchart and and a videotape of my birth. It disconcerted my fifth-grade teachers when I could not only define gonorrhea, but spell it. Correctly.

Anyway, to help me through "the awkward stage of adolescence" (as he put it), he got me a subscription to Playboy at a very early age.

It was a license to whack off.

My Mom couldn't do anything about it, and after a while she grew to accept it. It certainly lent a merry air to the house. My Mom began to say things like, "Mail's in! Let's see.... yep, your subscription to Boy's Life.... the newest Nickelodeon magazine... and let's see, it appears to be Bo Derek on a horse in Playboy this month...."

But the funny thing? I got bored by the second year. You'd think I'd be thrilled with all the naked flesh plastered before me, but they begin to look alike after awhile. By age ten, I was so blase to naked bodies that I could walk into the foulest triple-X theater in Times Square and say, "Seen it."

Now when I first wrote this I originally said that there was, and I quote, "no particular titillation (sorry) for me in seeing nude women." But anyone who knows me knows that I also have a hundred megabytes of picture files on my computer, giving a new meaning to the term "hard drive". All right, so I still like smut. Maybe my keyboard sticks for all the wrong reasons.

But I like to think that my father gave me a deep appreciation for the finer classes of pornography.

So. Here I am, a toddler boozer, a dogwater pornography collector, a twelve-year old druggie. And this is not particularly out of line. Now ask yourself a crucial question:

Ever wonder why all those kids started committing suicide at the drop of a hat in the 1980s? Wonder why everyone started joining gangs back then and shooting other kids? It wasn't because we wanted to. I know; we had a group meeting.

But by then, that was all we had left to piss you off.

You drained the well dry. All the tried-and-true methods of Parent Aggravation had been depleted. We talk about the Oil Shortages of the 1970s, but it was the Parent Excesses that hurt the most.

And much like the oil companies experimented with alternative energy sources like solar power back then, 1970s' kids had to discover new and even more potent means of rebellion. It wasn't pretty, mom. We didn't want to do it.

But you left us with no alternative.

Heck, do you think we wanted to invent rap? We're sorry!

But if you think we're bad, wait and see. The second wave of unshockable parents are starting to roll off the chute, and the result is the Trenchcoat Mafia. They're raising the bar on what shocks us. And who can blame them? Given the even more widespread use of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll among our current crop of moms 'n' dads - former highrollers who settled down into a nice family life only a few years ago - what the hell can the next generation do to rebel?

Heroin? Hell, we dealt it. Tattoos? Man, we used up more ink than a Pentel factory. Piercings? "Well, it keeps cutting the kid's face up when I breastfeed him, but otherwise this new nipple pierce is rad!"

Once again, we've sent the Chevy to the levy and the levy was dry.

And so I make a plea to the parents of the 1990s: When your kids become teenagers, just... pretend. Pretend you haven't seen it before.

I know it'll be tough. But when they get drunk and puke in your azaleas, you'll need to act like they got caught fucking the severed head of a transvestite nun during a taping of the Jerry Springer show. Overreact, for God's sake! Blow it all out of proportion! Oh, you'll be tempted to yank out your own hipflask of Stoli and show them what a real man can drink, but - don't. Send them to their room for ten weeks without food or water. Make 'em feel like they're really something.

Let them have the illusion. The illusion that they're rebelling. The illusion that it's serious. Because in its' own way... it is.

Because otherwise, you're gonna have eight year olds in polyester suits listening to gangsta rap and eating Pez out of a dispenser whose head is shaped like the exploded head of Kurt Cobain and man... it's gonna get ugly. Just ugly.

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