A Geek Goes Flying

Back in the day ( apparently 1982, and 1984 ), I remember waiting what seemed like forever to enter the Old Glory Theater ( Old Glory Amphitheatre ?) all the way in the back of Six Flags over Mid-America (now Six Flags over St. Louis ), by the Screamin' Eagle , to see The Beach Boys . I was early in my K-12 stint for those shows, which I remember as magical, even if the wait in the hot, humid Missouri summer was interminable. Anyway. Apparently, a bunch of bands played there back in the day , including several I’d love to see today: “Johnny Cash, Olivia Newton John, Kansas, Foreigner, Blue Oyster Cult, Head East, Tears For Fears, Night Ranger, Weird Al, Willie Nelson, Chuck Berry, The Orleans, Paul Revere And The Raiders, Electric Light Orchestra, Charlie Daniels, Toto, Ted Nugent, REO Speedwagon, The Commodores, Salt And Peppa, Randy Travis, Marshall Tucker Band, Garth Brooks, Reba, Oak Ridge Boys, Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, Kenny Rogers, Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch, The Monkees, R...

I’ve been hearing about the Xennial micro-generation for a while. It may have started with Generation Catalano, as defined in this 2011 blog post . (“We're not Gen X. We're not Millennials.”) Somewhat later (April 2014), maybe we were The Lucky Ones – Born In Between Gen X and Millennials . The term Xennial apparently started later in 2014, in this magazine’s point-counterpoint Reasonable People Disagree about the Post-Gen X, Pre-Millennial Generation . This 2015 blog post dubbed us the Oregon Trail Generation . An Apple IIe running Oregon Trail Which, why not? But Xennial seems to have stuck , maybe because r/TheOregonTrailGeneration is unwieldy, and doesn’t pluralize easily?) Whenever the origin and whatever the term, having the late 70s and early 80s carved out into a micro-generation has always made sense to me. Gen X spans too long a range (generally, 1965 to 1980 , but I’ve seen it as expansive as 1961–1981), and of course “Millenial” never quite fit ( 1981 to 1996 ; “You...