Of course I can believe it. The decline of the steel industry in Northwest Indiana is well documented. In the 1970s, the five steel mills of the area employed 100,000 people. Now they employ 20,000. Hammond, Gary, East Chicago, these cities have halved in population. They became dumps. This dump status was well established certainly by 1994 which is around the time that the casinos moved in. The casinos are now in decline, by the way.

So Back to the Future was in the news. Everybody loves that trilogy of cinematic brilliance, it seems.

Not me. I've seen the first one, I think, and at least parts of the second and third. Doesn't do it for me. And time-travel is my favourite genre of anything.

But it's not just me. NOBODY was talking about this shit when I was a kid. There were films that the kids talked about. Monster Squad, Stand by Me, The Wizard, stuff like this. So films of varying quality but films that children enjoy. Nobody was talking about Back to the Future. Not once. And it came out in the same time as these other films.

The films were obviously successful. I'm just saying that they weren't popular among my school chums and I have no nostalgia for the films.

Trying to think of other films that my classmates discussed now. I didn't really watch films because I didn't have friends. But...Batman, I guess. The first one. Dick Tracy was popular for a short while. McDonalds had some game that helped.

In high school, Cheech and Chong was big. You were really cool if you saw Cheech and Chong. And these are films from the 70s and early 80s so...they were 10 or 15 years old by then. The films are about two stoners and their misadventures. People would quote from the films and describe favourite scenes.

Romper Stomper was popular with the skinheads. They always talked about "braces" to everyone else's confusion. In the US, braces are the things on your teeth. The belt alternative are called "suspenders". Maybe in Australia, as in the UK, they call suspenders "braces" and that's where these classmates got this.

There was a guy who enjoyed The Craft. Powder was also popular for a short while. There was always a lot of hype around Christmas Story.

I wonder what these skinheads are up to nowadays. There were at least three of these guys. Two of them dropped out in the tenth grade. I don't think that the third one graduated either. That third guy went to the Catholic grade school with me. He was a fat guy and in the lowest reading group but even the lowest group yields more intelligent people than public school-educated people.

Well, here he is on Linkedin. He's been working in the steel mills for 16 years, doing a bunch of different shit there, he also works in the union, and also does some security/fire fighting thing. So good for him. It's important that non-academically-gifted people have a place to work where they can be productive and well-compensated and treated with respect.

He's also in the "liberals and progressives" group on Linkedin. Kind of interesting given the skinhead thing. Maybe not, though. You can recognise that black people and other minorities seem to have trouble behaving in society and still hold progressive views.