Bothy Are a Good Writer~

Stupid. When we were little kids, the mere utterance of that word would make heads turn, jaws drop, and little girls cry. They’d all be like “Oooh, Michael said STUPID!” in their tattletale singsong voices, completely oblivious to the fact that they themselves just said it. Stupid was our childhood equivalent of the dreaded F-Bomb, and most of us were scared to say it, lest we get a spanking from our parents or a time-out from our teachers. NOW, however, it’s a completely different story. Going two minutes without rattling off the word “Fuck” has become a challenge within itself, and the slightest provocation will set off a stream of obscenities, rushing out of the whitewater rapids we call mouths and voice boxes faster than we can even think about what we just said. Obscenities have become so deeply ingrained in our vocabulary that if our late grandparents and great grandparents were to hear us now, they’d probably have heart attacks and die upon sonic contact. “Fuck” has become the panacea of our vocabulary, and as Chelsea has told me so many times, it will ALWAYS suffice.

The sad thing is, though, that this is nowhere near the beginning of our generation’s problems. When the first Christmas that we could remember came around, we’d sit at the base of the tree for hours and hours on end, waiting eagerly for our parents to grudgingly shuffle their lazy “coolies” (Remember that we didn’t know that the word “ass” existed back then) out of bed. Being the kids that we were, though, our patience was only about the size of our attention spans, and you know how small THOSE things were. We would try and try oh, so very hard to wait for them, but we couldn’t help ourselves. We’d try as carefully as we could to open up the biggest box we could find, regardless of whether or not it was our name on it, without tearing the wrapping. Our parents, still sleeping at seven in the morning, would then be abruptly awoken by an obscenely loud, high-pitched shriek of ecstasy that crashed into their eardrums much in the same way as that retarded tenth reindeer crashed into the side of our house the year before. As they rushed out into the living room, stumbling over their robes, they’d see us, our adorable messy selves, covered from head to toe with wrapping paper and clinging onto the Nintendo 64 we just opened up as though it were Santa himself. It wasn’t much longer after that the mountain of presents, easily twice our size, was reduced to nothing. The pretty papers, which our parents painstakingly spent hours upon hours wrapping with precision . . . Their hard work was laid to waste, and the living room became a sea of opened packaging, small parts from the toys scattered willy-nilly, and gift wrap to your elbows, that you had to wade across a dense bog of the stuff just to get from one present to the next. But our parents couldn’t care less, because the illumination in our eyes, and our goofy Swiss cheese smiles, full of holes from the teeth we had pulled out after Halloween, made it all worthwhile to them. And while it was borderline depressing that we never could, we all wanted so badly to thank Santa for all the awesome gifts that he bestowed upon us.

Now, though, when WE get pulled out of bed by our little sisters at 4 in the morning, we just don’t have that fervor and enthusiasm which sparked our never ending adrenaline rushes. We just don’t believe in the magic anymore. Santa Claus? Our parents, who went out and spent massive amounts of money on our presents. The elves? Little kids in China who toil in a sweatshop for hours on end to make them for us. The retarded tenth reindeer that crashed into the side of our house twelve years back? Some burglar who tried to break into our house by swinging across with a grappling hook and rope, but wound up slamming into the side of our house like a dumb ass and dying. The magic is gone, and with it all meaning. Back when we were kids, our parents could have given us GUMBALLS for Christmas and called it a day, and we would have STILL been grateful. Now, our Christmas lists are longer than we are tall, and no satisfaction comes to our ungrateful, greed-ridden souls unless we get EXACTLY what we want off of the lists. And when the rest of the family comes over, we just give a curt, meaningless “Hello”, rip open the card for the money without even reading the message, and become recluses within the confines of our room, where we have continual Tourette’s outbursts at our newly acquired copies of Call of Duty, complete with door slamming, controller smashing, and head-to-wall banging, until the next relative, adding only more meaningless banter about politics or the New York Yankees to the family’s conversation, rings the doorbell, and the cycle repeats itself.

What happened to the days where we only had to walk two houses down and ring the neighbor’s doorbell, asking Antoinette or Kevin to come out and play Red Light Green Light with the rest of us? To the days when finger painting was an acceptable form of self-expression? To when Britney Spears was a sweet and innocent teenage girl whose music was nothing more than a catchy beat to which we could sing along? To when true love meant sharing your last animal cracker with the girl with the curly pigtails, even though it meant catching the cooties? To when the only dances we knew were the Electric Slide, the Cha-Cha, and the Chicken Dance? Those days are gone, and left in their wake are the long train rides back from Brooklyn at 4 in the morning, dreading the imminent hangover that looms over the horizon. Are the depressing poems billowing out from the darkest recesses of our broken-hearted souls. Are the constant news flashes from the paparazzi, hunting down celebrities just so they can catch them in their shattered, emotionally dysfunctional, messed up states, just so they can get us to laugh at and gossip about how the people we idolized and revered in our childhood have degenerated into whores and and trashy party girls. Are the ridiculous endeavors lasting for months filled with meaningless “I Love You”s, with the end goal being nothing more than getting into some girl’s pants, sparing not a single thought for how she may really feel about us. Are those repulsive sex songs playing in the dance halls that no one really knows how to dance to, so they just wind up dry humping each other to the beat because it’s the only thing that makes sense to them.

Is this what our generation will be known for?
Is this the story we’ll have to tell?
Is this what will become of our world?
Is this the end, or is there still worse to come?

This is my lament for the generation gone wrong.