I bought a book because of an eight page essay about Star Wars.

Actually, an eight page piece theorizing that Empire Strikes Back is the film that shaped the foundation of Generation X.

I've always been fascinated by whole generation concept. There's no one reliable date that pinpoints where Generation X ends and Generation Y begins, but generally it's somewhere in the late seventies.

Generation X is grunge and coffee shops and Douglas Coupland. They eventually ended up running Google and StarWars.com and pretty much every other website you visit on a daily basis. They may not have invented irony, but they certainly raised it to an art form.

Generation Y is Paris Hilton, The Olsen twins, Lindsay Lohan and American Idol. They're the reason the rat hole known as MySpace thrives, and I'm not sure I can ever forgive them for that.

Whatever the case (feel free to disagree) I don't fit much into either pigeonhole. I was born more than a year after A New Hope was released, and I was in junior high when Nirvana's 'Nevermind' came out... I remember this stuff, (well, not 1977) but I didn't live it, not really. (Especially 1977.) High school is like a time warp - you go in, but you don't really absorb anything but the state of being in high school. NIN tickets and Kurt Kobain memorial t-shirts are just the window dressing.

But to the book: Sex, drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, by Chuck Klosterman. The subtitle is 'A low culture manifesto' and it's pretty much on the mark. What precedes 'Sulking with Lisa Loeb on the Ice Planet Hoth' is 12 pages on Saved by the Bell. This is not textbook deep thinking, although I do admire Klosterman's conclusions in both cases.

For instance:

"Studied objectively, Luke Skywalker was not very cool. But for kids who saw Empire, Luke was the Man. He was the guy we wanted to be. Retrospectively, we'd like to claim Han Solo was the single-most desirable character -- and he was, in theory. But Solo's brand of cool is something you can't understand until you're old enough to realize being an arrogant jerk is an attractive male quality. Third-graders don't want to be gritty and misunderstood; third graders want to be Mark Hamill."

Pure and simple truth, sure. Completely foreign to me? Yes. I'm sure I saw the movies as a kid, but I don't remember seeing them, at least not as clearly as my mother buying a Jabba the Hutt playset for my cousin's birthday, to my deep disgust. (Now, I loved Hot Wheels, but Jabba was just too much the anti-Barbie for me.) My first lucid encounter with the galaxy far, far away was as a deeply cynical 13-year-old the same month 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' first charted.

Which isn't to say I didn't love the movies. One does not end up logging more than a decade in this fandom otherwise. But I experienced them - and maybe still do - a bit differently than the folks who saw them as third-graders, or who saw them in the original cultural context as adults, or who first saw them all gussied up in 1997. I don't remember ever being surprised by Vader being Luke's father or Leia being his sister. These were just things I knew from growing up in a household of geeks.

If there was ever a point to this ramble, I think I lost it. But I think it boils down to the fact that nothing in this culture is one size fits all. No one fits into all the specific holes they're supposed to.

And also, Chuck Klosterman looks a bit like a blond version of my dad.

Epilogue: One day, I would like to be someone who gets paid for writing about Star Wars and Saved by the Bell and John Cusack. Although I expect the first step to that is not to start writing at 3am.