After the Sun’s extensively long starring role in the summer production of Summer, it’s overacting finally got a co-star of whose performance equaled it strength. Yes gloomy, rainy and cloudy today stepped into the spotlight darkened the earth and skies. The meteorologists were handing out 100’s this summer like Biden is handing out 100’s to people with student loans. This summer’s weather (or this coming fall’s weather) doesn’t affect me that much anyways. That’s because I’m almost always in a climate-controlled environment called the indoors. For those weirdos that actually like to being outside, and care about things outside their little bubbles, it affected them quite a bit. Which goes to show you, that caring about the inside is so much more important than caring about the outside.

Some people think they can affect change and that just sounds exhausting. The only way I can affect change is by giving someone a dollar for something that cost $.50. Then I’m getting change. But who has a dollar in their wallet anymore? There are so many kinds of ways to pay someone these days, credit cards, debit cards, PayPal, Cash App, Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, Venmo, Zelle App, Facebook Pay, Instagram Pay, that who has time for actual Benjamins? I guess grandparents do sometimes, but even they like to pay with checks, which kids don’t really know much about. They look at checks like they are foreign objects and don’t know what they are supposed to do with the paper their grandparents just gave them. Oh right, they are supposed to take a picture of it so they can deposit in their Cash App. Got it.

The reason I am so valuable on this earth is that people my age know what life was like pre-internet. We are the bridge between the boomers and the Zillenials. As the bridgemasters, we could help make the whole world a better place by sharing the wisdom of both ages to each other. Notice I said we could. But we don’t. Because we are not your messenger boys and girls. We don’t get paid enough for that. So, we will just let you both suffer, because that is our job. To teach suffering.

As a Gen Xer, I’m approaching the half-century mark. I find myself driving down memory lane more and more, which in my case is Memory Boulevard, Memory Court and Memory 2100 W, because Present Day Lane kind of sucks.

The nice thing about Memory Boulevard for most people is that they get to keep all the happy memories and discard all the bitter stuff. The memories are all still there, but on the Inside Out, where Joy, Anger, Fear, Disgust and Sadness live, there is also a guy they didn’t show you named Ed (Short for editing). For most people, he takes all the normal, boring, and painful memories and edits them down to a few happy moments you are allowed to remember.

My Ed doesn’t really get along with Joy very much, so he likes to “edit” out her overacting in my Inside and let Bitter Ben take the starring role in my mind. Thank goodness, because Joy’s acting is way over the top and pretty annoying. In fact, you’ll notice that she is similar to Leslie Knope from Parks and Rec, where her optimism is swallowed up by Ron Swanson’s bitterness.

Thank goodness that my memory lane is filled with bitterness. Bitterness fuels most great things. For instance, if it wasn’t for the greatness of bitterness, you could say goodbye to that Iphone you are using to read this. Apple exists because of the great Steve Job’s bitterness. If the other Steve (Wozniak) was running the show, we’d still be typing on Apple II and Ipods might just be getting introduced. In addition, we wouldn’t have the aforementioned Joy, Anger, Fear, Disgust or Sadness, because Steve Jobs made Pixar.

How about Facebook? If Zuckerberg wasn’t so bitter about his date going poorly at the beginning of The Social Network, he wouldn’t have invented Facebook. And how would we display our bitterness about Facebook, without Facebook? We’d have to be mad at MySpace for sucking and that’s no fun.

Most importantly, we wouldn’t have had Ben’s Bitter Blog, and for that we should all thank our unlucky stars. If it wasn’t for all that bitterness and rage he felt about his job back in 2012, this piece of history wouldn’t have been created. You wouldn’t have 1380 posts about bitterness with my name on it. It would’ve just been a blog called Amanda’s bitter blog, with 480 much better thought-out and well written blogs. But would it have had the same ring to the name? ABB just isn’t quite as bitter sounding as BBB.

Thankfully, inside Memory Lane we had the oh-so-valuable Ed character to suppress those positive memories from our skulls. Because if everything was happy all the time, we never would have had all these great companies and blogs that produced so much of what makes us great. And more bitter, and that cycle will create a whole new host of companies that we can be bitter about in the future. For that, I would like to thank bitterness for changing the world. To new bitter memories!

ARRRRRRGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH

Bitter Memory Lane Ben