The nineties are an important decade to me. I went to high school and college and New York in the nineties. Most of my favorite music is from the nineties. I, for one, couldn’t be more thrilled that it’s going through a revival. And, frankly, I’m sick of it.

My streaming services are showing all the same playlists labeled “90s nostalgia.” All the movies I remember from that decade are being converted into TV series or further sequels (True Lies the series? Come on! Does anyone my age or older remember the plot of that movie? No, they remember Jamie Lee Curtis stripping and Arnold Schwarzenegger making quips as he murdered people, not the generic hotties in the TV show being chaste like all TV shows and movies these days—but that’s another rant.)

The nineties are fucking everywhere, with major brands getting in on it and middle-aged celebrities coming out of their coffins and getting botox. I imagine this must be how LGBTQ people feel about Pride Month, when all the corporations put rainbows on their packaging and continue to give money to hateful, bigoted politicians.

I feel like this is my time, and I can be the old-man expert on the decade, but young people don’t want to listen to me.

On the other hand, my soon-to-be-published novel, Hanííbááz Rising, is set in 1995. I love that teenagers are seeking out and trading CDs like my generation did with vinyl records. (Millennials didn’t really get to do this because nostalgia for the eighties meant tapes, which were the single worst way to store music.)

But I know I’m being pandered to, and that never fails to piss me off.