I’M NOT THAT much older than the average millennial child. The distinction between Gen X and Gen Y is an ambiguous line that falls almost directly on my birth year of 1983, which is why the differences between us are that much more striking. Millennials are alien to me—and I suspect—to many people my age and older.

I grew up without cable or Internet.  There was no philosophical reason my parents withheld cable; they just weren’t TV people. We read books. I’m actually tangentially named after a fictional private eye from Boston and my middle name—although quite urban—is from a recurring Louis L’Amour character.

We got cable and Internet my junior year of high school, but the damage was done. I was no longer a part of my generation. I knew more about John Irving than John Hughes or John Cusack.

In my teens I tried every drug I could get my hands on. That’s what people in my town did. It was rainy and cold all the time, so we did drugs, played sports and imagined life after high school. A lot of them are still there. Almost no one who left goes back.

I frequented the bowling alley in front of my apartment building in D.C. so often to use the pay phone, the bouncer thought I was selling drugs out of the place. I got a cell phone the next week. This was my junior year of college.

In college I owned an anachronistic desktop PC that was infected with so many viruses I once placed a prophylactic on my monitor to stem the tide of Internet bacteria (it’s no wonder I attempted to smoke a light-bulb that night).

In college, I didn’t keep a web log. AIM was for when you saw a cute girl at the bar.

Early in college I took to writing juvenile rap lyrics with obscure French Symbolist references. I once used a creative writing class project to unveil a new song I had completed. I never rapped again; although, a few friends still use my emcee name: “Tyrel the Color of Tylenol.” The Sackett family was hip-hop without knowing it. I still have a CD somewhere of the recording, but only my ex-girlfriend and her friend ever had the privilege of listening to it.

Later in college, I vacillated between drunken megalomania and intellectual indignation with my fellow literature classmates. This stemmed from immersing myself in Nietzsche’s analysis of Dionysus in The Birth of Tragedy (Apollo was lame) and reading Blake and Rimbaud because they seemed more down to earth.

I told roughly 4,913 jokes about people on Facebook before turning the age of 20. I once openly questioned someone’s intelligence simply because they liked perusing YouTube for cute cat videos. I did not know at the time this was an actual job.

I opened Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Digg, Fark, Reddit, and Flickr accounts in May of 2009. Before that, I used to write on Blogger and use a Hotmail email account. I once wrote a Blogspot post in college about a drunken-driving excursion with one of my buddies.  I included the name of the company he interned for in the post. Their HR department called him into their office the next day because they’d found the piece. He did not get fired.

I didn’t sign on to the Internet for  six months after that.  We’re still great friends.

I did not own a computer that could access the Internet from the years 2005-2009.  In late 2009, when I bought my first new computer, a $450 Compaq, it had a version of iPaint that didn’t crop pictures.  My first cell phone that had Internet access was purchased in that same spring. I had been out of college for almost 4 years.

Directly after college, I sputtered around D.C. for two years doing entry-level work as a call center rep and technical writer for my alum’s law school. Aching for a girl I still can’t get over even today, I moved up to New York City. I lived like Jay McInerney for the first two years, most of which I can’t remember. It is New York City, after all.  In April of 2009, I got laid off from my sales job. I collected my unemployment and gave writing on the Internet another chance.

And now here I am. Hopefully you understand why the freakishly ambitious and talented millennial kids who swarm over this town like Wu-Tang’s killer beez on Adderall (I hear Meth loves Gawker) scares and confuses the shit out of someone like me.

I lived 25 years of life outside on basketball courts and soccer fields playing sports and doing some drugs. When I was inside I read books on pages I could touch. I lived away from computers. When I wrote it was with a pen and paper.

Now I’m generally broke, and struggling in a career where my peers are already EIC’s at large publications and websites. I spend roughly 15 hours a day online. I still laugh a lot, but I don’t read anything but poetry in books. I bare the bruises of a man that lived life a different way for a long time. I can show them to you if you ever have the time or the stomach for them.

All my friends have jobs in finance, law, and medicine, but have no clue what Twitter is. Every time I look at my phone to see if an editor is going to get back to me on a pitch, they think I’m “Twittering.” Whereas they only check their phones for “business.” I can’t keep a straight face long enough to explain that some companies pay people to tweet.

Much of the writing that I’ve been paid for is completely lost on them. I don’t mind.  They’ll always be my friends. They are Generation X, except not really.  They’re the last frontier; the last group almost entirely offline; the ones that don’t know about RSS feeds, or gulping large doses of information like an alcoholic chugs whiskey when it’s half-priced. I love them for this. They keep everything familiar when it’s not. Life doesn’t take place on a computer screen for people like us.

You, the millennials, don’t have people like that in your life. You never will. They’re the last of a soon-to-be extinct breed. I might send a tweet tonight and update my Tumblr a half-a-dozen times. I might do some HTML code for work, or edit a video on FCP.  I’ll never be a millennial.  Hopefully you know why now.

Pretty soon the millennial generation will be my new set of editors. I think I’ll laugh even harder then, but mainly because my tear ducts don’t work anymore.