Important warning for anyone
considering reading further: this bit is very stylistically self-indulgent. It’s neither linear nor written for
clarity. While not exactly pure stream-of-consciousness, it’s pretty damned
close. My advice to you is to not read
it at all. Despite being pretty short,
especially by my standards, it’s likely to aggravate you with all the
aggravation of a much longer text.
Just so it’s clear, I’m not joking or being
self-effacing. Proceed at your own risk.
As
far as impetus goes, I was sitting at my computer at Tate Street and thinking
that this current and rising generation of young adults might prove to be the
best of us, in the end. For many reasons,
both small and great, they will do great things. I’m sure of it. My generation has, or had, many of the same
ideals, but we lacked the courage that those replacing us will soon find. This new generation, these scions of the
internet and children of scorn (swimming Spoon River and looking forlorn) give
me a strange sensation of faith. In
what, I’m not certain, but I like to think that it’s in that better world my
generation never quite believed in.
~***~
These are
the games we play, the idle whiling away of foolish hours, the half-closed eyes
amidst the shared impulsive laughs, the zephyr drifting through as customers
arrive or depart, opening the doors to lingering drafts, familiar faces mixed
with those of strangers, with a cheerful smile or a soulsick heart bearing
paper flowers. Sometimes one will wave
at us, or mumble a friendly hellogoodbye;
to balance the social spectres, we return the greetings with a friendly murmured
sigh. The exchanges slip past like
whispers, immaculate in their brevity, barely noticed and soon forgotten during
the hidden dangers and zwischenzugs, the
paucity of scale in the en passants and
sacrificial aftermaths, the whole board contrived in a million forking paths
that shift and advance, or break and fail.
And once again the idle foolish hours, the illusion of
meaning hiding the truth of levity.
This is what we believed in: not a damned thing that mattered. The Sixties slouched toward Bethlehem. We were just waiting fruitlessly to be born
into it.
I’m not sure what we thought would happen if our hour
actually did come round at last. In a
drab age in a drab land filled with all the drabbery we could handle, we
re-enacted the largest flea circus the world had ever known. Winding springs and clinkclank levers,
absolved of any call to action, rejecting all the nows-or-nevers, we took the
world sloppyslow. Steady as grass and equally effective.
Grungy flannel kept us dry, but only just.
When it came down to us against the world, as it always does for each
new generation, the world rolled its eyes, and rightly so.
In a musty murky warmth of all the
fogdream seasons, the retreat to the buzzdrone of air-conditioned iterations of
rooms, chewing dry bread and mustard greens, convinced the clock could be
forgotten, leading neither to our salvations nor to our dooms. A generation of indigobirds nesting in the truths that other generations –
and only other generations – had
devised. Nothing ever meant anything if
we could help it. We were too cool for
that, obsessed with making certain that no-one had cause to think we gave a
damn. Without expectations, we could not be
surprised.
We found a true courage in our lack of convictions.
Peccatum
nostrum. Our unoriginal sin.
Standing astride our interdictions of a changing changeless world atop
slippery rocks and ingots covered in verdigris.
We had nothing to do and nowhere to be. We grew conservative, not out of spite, but
out of disbelief in a better world, and with this came a withheld
grief under the battered redlight.
We were not the future that we
should have been.
~To be continued when I feel the urge to
do so, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps the year 2035~
