For anyone who was born from 1980-1985, a single decade set in motion a chain of events that would mold our formative years like the balls of silly putty we spent hours rolling and pressing onto newspapers. Ten years that would leave wounds and scars that time could never heal. Someday we will have to tell our kids exactly what went wrong, explaining to them how we could have possibly made the choices we did.
That defining period is, of course, the 90′s.
What follows is but one of many defining aspects of this era, to which anyone 27-32 and older would still say ‘That was awesome!’
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Anyone you meet has probably experienced the sublime ecstasy of sniffing a marker. The big black sharpies, of course, are essentially the heroin of the marker sniffing world. Given the penchant of school children of all ages to partake of their wares, the marker makers evidently decided that their products were not ubiquitous enough; the ‘hard markers’ may have been too much, too soon. So they created their own gateway drug in the form of these colorful, sniffable markers.
Granted, teachers had long been accomplices in the sniffing business- children had been initiated into it via scratch and sniff stickers, ostensibly a reward for good grades. Little did we know that it was simply an entry into the harder stuff.
So parents would get their kids markers whose sole differentiating feature was that YOU COULD SNIFF THEM. They even had numerous flavors- orange, cherry, blueberry. Grape, naturally, was the flavor of choice, since it was the closest to the black markers that you really wanted to sniff. Only a few brave souls ventured into black licorice territory.
Since we all had them, it would seem society had little to no difficulty with its children SNIFFING MARKERS.
What could go wrong?
