truefiction.org

I’m sick of hearing about generation Y. There’s a hand-me-down attitude in the name, an implied dismissal of everything that our generation has worked for in the past twenty-three years. We’re not a generation defined by our love for technology, for video games, for cable television and fourth-graders that curse like sailors (and almost as much as we did in fourth grade). We’re not defined as the generation that sends everyone to college, or the generation that has skyrocketing rates of depression. We’re the generation that, simply, came after Generation X. It’s as if our older slacker brother finally got a job and handed down all his old T-shirts. And that’s some fucking bullshit.

Let’s face it: if you were born after 1980, and if you’re reading this you’re probably my friend and therefore born after 1980, you’re getting shit on. You’re besieged by the siren calls of MTV and TRL. You’re constantly swimming in a sea of advertising, mostly dedicated to your demographic, mostly selling sex with hotter women than we will ever meet and the joys of getting drunk on new, classier malt liquor. You’re being forced to watch prodigies like LeBron James and Alicia Keyes and Conor Oberst found at an ever younger age, making you feel old at twenty. And on top of all this, you don’t even have a proper name for your generation.

In the mid 1990s, right as Gen-Y started to pick up speed, there were a couple of other terms that were flying around. There was the Nintendo generation, raised on Super Mario Brothers and Sonic the Hedgehog. There was the Internet Generation, which was a pretty good fit. We grew up with the internet; it hit maturity right around the time we were discovering we now had hair in our nether-regions and our voices were cracking. It even went through a crazy high-school love affair with the kindly gentleman from New York, Wall Street. But then snowball.com decided to appropriate it for it’s advertising–THE DESTINATION FOR THE INTERNET GENERATION–and it slowly went out of favor. Not to mention that it abbreviates to the iGeneration, which makes it seem like all of us were invented by Steve Jobs.

Still, how’d we end up with such a derivative, boring name like Gen-Y? Laziness, I guess. Without a Dennis Coupland to come up with a catchy title, and the other titles focusing on just a tiny aspect of our personalities, magazine writers and editors fell into a rut and did the easy thing. After all, Generation X used to be called the post-boomers, which was even an even more boring and condescending title–they were the “after” generation. But there seems to be a greater acceptance of Generation Y on the part of the kids, at least until they start to think about it and realize what’s going on. And there’s also the problem of how we behave, and whether there’s a big difference between us and those who have come before.

Do we have ideas? Is there a philosophy forming in college dorms and student ghettos that’s noticably different from ten years ago? I’d have to say yes. For one thing, there’s much less of Coupland’s knee-jerk irony, and a huge rise in tasteless jokes. (Why’d the baby stop crying? Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.) But that’s not really a sign of difference, more an evolution. But what is different is the way upward mobility has become the new religion of America, followed by most people exactly the same way Catholics treat their beliefs. Instead of getting baptized, going to confession, receiving Communion and being confirmed, all without any real sense of what the religion is about, the new sacraments are: doing well in high school, taking a Kaplan course to beat the SATs, going to a good college and coming out with a high-paying job. Why are we doing this? Because it’s what we have to do in order to survive, just like Catholicism is what I’m supposed to do in order to get eternal life in heaven.

This same, godless, assembly-line approach to life gives yield to the other thing we do, which is find something, anything to believe in. The number of niches that have been created just so that we can be part of something bigger than ourselves is absurd. There are: frat boys, sorority girls, indie kids, fundies, neo-hippies (pot and adderall!), goths, politicos, and any number of smaller subcultures that don’t have easily assigned names. If something’s got potential, people will latch on to it. Look at the Dean movement online, or the Draft Clark thing, and you realize that people are putting their faith in someone, devoting huge amounts of time to him, purely because other people have already put their faith in him. Anything that makes life a little more enjoyable, that could make things improve even the tiniest bit, is worth the effort.

But the defining aspect of our generation is the growing sense that we’re screwed, and the other two behaviors are intimately tied into to this. There’s our ever-increasing dependence on technology, to the point where an internet virus causes huge financial losses and a power outage shuts down an entire quadrant of the country. (People: the New York blackout might have been the biggest blackout ever, but a hundred years ago there were no blackouts. (Because there was no power. Shut up.)) There’s the extremely short-sighted policies of the Current Administration, and even those who think Bush is God are a little worried about their future. There’s the ever-greedier behaviors of corporations; people who unironically wear advertising on their T-Shirts because they just don’t know any better. There’s the dawning realization that corporations do not have our best interests at heart, and the frightening on that there’s not much we can do about it. You see it in the eyes of everyone–no matter who you talk to, they’re spooked about what comes next. Another huge attack? Not being able to find a job after graduation? Robots taking over our economy within twenty years? (That one’s a stretch.) Even fundamentalism is a way of coping with the modern world–having an omniscient, omnipotent Other in control of everything slows the world down, gives everything some meaning. It’s a fight against science, and science is a fight against mysticism, and the battle lines have been drawn.

We’re fucked. The whole damn generation is the Fucked Generation. No one’s really been willing to come out and say it, and so we’re generation Y: the bastard sons of that bitch Generation X. Striding purposefully forward with no real destination, fake family units smiling brightly into a future clouded by fog and microprocessors and RFIDs, grinning in the face of total destruction. This is who we are. Say it loud. Say it proud. Give yourselves a new identity–not one that’s derived as a matter of after whom we were born, but one that’s a function of what we are. Force it into the national discourse; make the Times and the New Yorker bleep out our name. Make the people understand we don’t like what’s going on, and we’re just about ready to start making some changes. Because if we don’t, it doesn’t mean we’re any less fucked. It just means we’ll be sitting around asking, “Y us?”

I drove block three today. (Worst introduction ever.–Ed.) During the 1100h. class change, a number of idiotic dumbshits decided that they would try to jump on the back doors of the bus. This, for those of you who don’t know, is a big no-no. It’s dangerous, and it will get you a sizable fine if you do it on a bus you have to actually pay for.

The standard solution to this problem is for the bus driver to yell out, “Don’t get on the back doors!” Usually a few people will snicker, and everyone else will get on the front like they’re supposed to.

Not today. Not only do I have to deal with three separate people who do this at the same stop, one of them gets on the front of the bus even though I said there was no more room. He pushed himself back behind the line and I stopped caring.

When he gets off, though, he tells me that, “Just because you wear that blue jacket doesn’t mean you have the right to yell at people.” So I said,

“You’re right. But my Irish walking hat does.”

“And just because you’re wearing an ugly grey sweatsuit doesn’t give you the right to ignore the rules.”

“I’m sorry that your head is a such a desolate, fucked-up place.”

“And you just cost me eight-thousand dollars. What are you going to do about it . . . asshole?”

“Frat-tastic!”

“No, it gives me the right to enforce the rules and Federal law on this bus. If you disobey the rules, like getting on the back doors or not staying behind the line, I can kick you off. I wanted to kick your dumb, ‘I’m above everyone’ ass off my bus, but instead I decided to let you ride. You don’t like it? Don’t ride the bus again. I’m sure we’ll miss your superior intellectualism, impeccable logic and dry wit, but somehow, eventually, we’ll get by. . . asshole.”

“Are you on the crack? Of course I can yell!”

“I WASN’T YELLING. I JUST HAVE TROUBLE MODULATING THE VOLUME AND TONE OF MY VOICE.”

“I fucking! unfortunately have donkey-raping shit eater tourettes.”

“Always fucking naysaying! Why don’t you invent something like inward singing? Fuck you! Fucking…cockass!”

“Can I see your CDL? No? Well, then here, take these two transfer tickets. The next bus to Shut-the-hell-up street will be by in three minutes.”

“I didn’t watch my buddies die face down in the muck so that you can–sorry, I thought I was John Goodman for a minute there.”

“[Obligatory Big Lebowski quote goes here]. . . . Asshole.”

“Does she dress like a tart?” (Dude, no one’s going to get that. We shouldn’t use it. By the way, this whole idea is terrible.–Ed.)

“You ever get the feeling that Ari Fleischer is a total douche?”

“I don’t know. Let’s see what my Glock has to say about that, shall we? What’s that, Glock, you say shoot ‘im? Okay. Wahoowa, mothuhfucker!”

“No, but I do have the right to make sure that I get my ungrateful, full-of-themselves passengers to class and back on time, safely, and without incident. The only reason I yell is because otherwise people won’t hear me. Imagine if everyone was like you: trying to get on the back doors, talking smack to the drivers, ignoring safety rules that are there for a fucking reason, let me tell you, this isn’t the sort of shit that Congress just passes for shits and giggles, there were a lot of accidents back in the day. But I’ll tell you what: next time you ride, I won’t enforce the rules, and when we crash, I hope the last thing you see is your hands holding your own steaming entrails. Good day.”

“Have a good day, sir. Thanks for riding UTS.”

Marie called up and asked why the site hadn’t been updated lately, and I didn’t have an answer. I never have an answer. I don’t think I need an answer. I update the site when I feel like it, and if I don’t that’s okay with me too.

She said something about not being able to follow through on any of my big plans, that everything I ever attempt to do was bound to fail. Not because the ideas weren’t good, of course, but because I didn’t have the work ethic to bring them to fruition. Which is true. My work ethic sucks. I’ve essentially failed out of school; Brilliant Young & Angsty is three weeks delayed and who knows whether it will come out in time for the release party.

“But so what?” I told her. “To finish something is to diminish it.”

God, I wish I could have seen the look on her face after I said that. Goes completely against her work ethic, which apparently now includes riding on other people to make them do shit also. “That’s not true at all. That’s only true because you’re lazy, and on the occasions that you do actually finish something, it never lives up to the vision you had for it in your own mind.”

“Because the vision is always more pure than what I put out.” With a click of the mouse I bring up the Word document I was working on. “Look. I’m looking at a brilliant article right now, about the war on Iraq and why it’s a bad idea. I’ve got over two hundred pages of research–that I’ve read all of–for this article. I have the perfect sense for how I’m going to write this article. And yet it’s stuck on page 2.”

“At some points, Nick, you’ve got to sit down and just push your way through it.” She sighs and I look out my window. There’s no snow, like they said it would this weekend. There’s only the rain and the falling leaves, and the grey squirrels (the black squirrel mutation apparently doesn’t exist this far south) scampering about, trying to store food for the winter. “You wait until the last minute to get something done, and then you go complaing about how it isn’t done and it won’t be any good. Just sit down and do it.”

“Okay,” I said, and I hung up the phone.

Outside, on my porch, the old green couch that the old residents left is getting soaked by rain falling off the roof. Beer cans and cigarette ashes and three-day-old copies of the Times cover the bus seat (which, incidentally, is on the opposite side of the porch and red). The cold was seeping back into Charlottesville, and for the first time I was truly cold in October here, having been readjusted by the unpleasant heat of a Blue Ridge summer. I lit a cigarette and waited. I know fully well that Marie doesn’t exist, that I made her up for the purposes of a story, or the manifestation of the part of me that still wants to do everything, but none of that matters. I sat down and waited for her to show up anyway.

Why Bush as President was a Bad Idea

Apparently, in a post-apocalyptic world,

It’s going to be the physicists versus the bus drivers

Tribute Haiku to Tenacious D’s “Tribute”

Tenacious D rules

The imperative to rock?

Pure inspiration

Banging on the Doors

Yo, Gorski man!

You okay in there?

Wake up and drink!

Why won’t you come out of your room

And have a beer or three?

Hell, we’ve even got some Remy Martin

How it Goes Down: an Order

First we attack Iraq

Then Iraq attacks Israel

Then Israel nukes Iraq

Then France nukes Israel

And then it’s time for us to steal the buses.

It’s like, it’s like that time that you were sitting alone at home and were just watching the tv, and you saw that nike ad for the first time, the one where the guy is being chased by the chicken. You know the one, “He cannot fool the chicken; no, wait, he has fooled the chicken.” Or when you were at a friends house drinking beer and playing asshole, the tv on in the background, and the new verizon advert with the guy’s tounge bitten by the weasel plays. Everyone just cracks up, like, “What the hell is going on there?” Yeah, it’s just like that.

Or maybe: you were at a party, and a song comes on that you’ve heard a hundred times on the radio starts blaring over the speakers. It’s that Eminem song that isn’t nearly as good as “The Real Slim Shady,” or that Nelly song that isn’t nearly as good as “Ride With Me.” But regardless of that, you start jerking arythymically to the beat, bumping into your fellow revelers, trying your damn best not to spill your beer. You start to think to yourself, “The booty music was so much better when I was a first-year,” but then you realize you were just drunk and impressionable back then.

Is it like that?

Then maybe it’s like lying down in the field outside town, staring up at the stars. The Moby song, “We are all made of stars” or something like that, pops into your head. You used to like Moby, back when Play came out, having no idea of all the stuff he did before then, but then suddenly he was everywhere and he did that version of “South Side” with Gwen Stafani. I mean, come on, Gwen Stafani? WTF, man? WTF? So anyway, you’re lying on your back and staring up at the sky, and you start to feel a little insignificant and all that crazy cliched stuff you don’t want to think but you always fall into it anyway. You get dismayed by this, don’t you?

Still: you can’t help but think, blissed out listening to your walkman walking to the first day of classes, that no matter what your feeling, this is a moment for a movie to document, and this song should be on the soundtrack right now.

Too bad what you’re listening to is the screams of a guy who’s just had his tounge pierced by a weasel.

Well, then: It’s not too much longer now until everything is finished. I’ve been working on and off over the past few weeks on getting everything working on this site and, considering that I’ve always either (a) just did updates with notepad or (b) used something like blogger, learning how to use Moveable type has been a pain in the ass.

We’re slowly getting there, though. Slowly. I hope to put up some new content–I’m not sure if it’s going to be about the Belle and Sebastian concert I saw last night or the Audi-driving 16 year olds of my hometown yet–later on tonight. After work, or something like that. And then, hopefully, there won’t be any more site news for a very, very long time, and false narrative will onceagain become nothing more than boring excerpts from my regular life, just tarted up a bit.

So relax. At any rate, I’ll probably get all my old dec articles up at some point later today, also, since I’ve got absolutely nothing else to do. So if you’re bored and you don’t live in C-ville (or, you simply miss the wit and joy of “The Top Five Conspiracies of 2000″), you can enjoy those until I get off my ass and write something new.

And then, of course, there’s the pain of re-setting up Glorified Captions. That entails going through this whole site creation process over again. On the other hand, it won’t be as bad. I’ve already done all this once already, and thus it will be a simple matter of cut and paste. I hope.

Um…so yeah, I have no idea what this looks like. All I know is that the new stuff will start tomorrow, as soon as I get some idea of how to use Movable Type. Yeah. Exciting ain’t it?

I know that I haven’t updated in two weeks. There are a number of reasons for this. First and primarily, it’s nearing the end of the semester and I haven’t exactly had a lot of free time. Second, I’ve been preparing to move everything over to truefiction.org, to which I own the domain rights. The main problem there is trying to find a suitable web provider–this can’t cost too much money and it has to have a certain number of features–Perl 5 and PHP 4 are very important, MySQL less so–but there are other reasons for this as well.

Especially since I started going to afterDinner over the weekend (it’s a site for short fiction and personal narrative, as well as an online writers workshop), I started thinking about other things that could be done with a weblog format. I mean, the majority of weblogs that are out there all follow the same basic structure–short little snippets of ________, with an occasional longer essay or three every so often to mix things up. It’s great, but goddamn there’s a lot of it out there.

So I ask you: what if a weblog were almost entirely fictional?

I’m sure it’s not nearly as revolutionary an idea as I currently think it is (sleep deprivation = bad). There’s a better than likely chance that many websites are already doing something along these lines. And given my predilection towards long essays and linkless blurbs as it is, this site isn’t much different than a novel written up in a journal format.

But a journal formatted novel, set up in a world that’s ostensibly the same as ours but with some really weird stuff going on–I’m currently thinking of having a tron/matrix/neuromancer type of thing going on in the background, but different. Earlier. The first human computer interface in development. Now it gets a little more interesting. (I think. Maybe not. I’ll need to think this through while not tired.) The only major feature of this would be that it would be serialized, with real time updates as i think of them. Short plot twist? I can write it in between classes. I’ll be stuck with what I’ve posted, which could make for an interesting experience when I’m nine months in and I can’t remember which character picked up the flowers for the office party.

Then to get really crazy you could throw in a few other sites to the mix–one of the older characters could have a site on geocities or AOL, for example. There’d probably only be the one journal, but this way I can also get to have other characters in the story be slightly more fleshed out. I don’t know. I have to think about this a lot more before I make any decisions.

But it’s a hell of an idea, right?

It’s Easter. For a few more hours, anyway, and I am left with a few questions: Why, for example, does the only Catholic church in Charlottesville get access to University Hall? Why does a Catholic mass–which already awakens a whole mess of conflicting emotions in myself regardless of whatever else is going on–feel even stranger in a sports arena? Why doesn’t Catholicism reinvent itself as the religion for smart people^TM?

I mean, let’s face it: the church is currently in a pretty bad position. The whole pedophilia thing is going to cause huge problems with the church’s public image. Pope John-Paul II’s stated positions on celibate and woman priests don’t fly particularly well with American sentiments, and

could possibly cause a new schism in the church.

The only way for the Church to save itself at this point is to do something the Jesuits have been on to for a long time–make Catholicism smarter than all the other religions out there. They’re already on their way, despite a few missteps in the past fifty years or so. Doubt me? Just switch between the Trinity Broadcasting Network (televangelists, talking in “tongues,” really large pink beehive hairdos) and EWTN, which is the Catholic god channel. The difference is huge. Where TBN is continuously over-the-top and gaudy-as-hell, EWTN (which may or may not be the right name) is simple, down to earth, and doesn’t try to seduce you into giving money to redeem your soul. Catholics learned their lessons after the whole indulgences thing. Catholicism has had education in mind for years–look at all the Catholic schools that abound in this country, the Christian Brothers and Jesuits–and they’ve been getting away from the “Baltimore Catechism” and the mindless memorization that it entails. But there’s more that needs to be done.

First, bring back the Latin mass. There are many people that will tell you that the biggest success of Vatican II was allowing masses to be said in the vernacular language, bringing the common people back into the fold. And it’s true that, in the beginning, the Mass was said in Greek and switched to Latin when no one knew Greek anymore. So what? First off, we need to get rid of the common people–they’re the ones who are going to be chillin’ with little kids anyway and, if they want a vernacular mass, they can go be Protestant or something. Second, the reason Greek was the first choice for the mass had to do with the fact that, even in Ancient Rome, it was the chosen language for Roman intellectuals.

People these days don’t want religion to be more relevant in their lives. Look around: how much trouble in the past two years or so have religions caused? You’ve got Islamic terrorism, those Army of God dudes killing abortion doctors, the Israeli army blowing shit up, the palestinians blowing shit up in response–religion is changing the world into hell. No, what we need is a form of religion that is exceedingly irrelevant to the modern day man or woman. And what can be more irrelevant than a mass and prayers in a dead language?

Next, emphasize the good cultural elements of the Catholic church. The art of Caravaggio and other artists of the counter-reformation still stands up today as some of the best art of the second Millennium. Hell, the Renassiance started in Italy and, though I’m probably wrong about this, was a result of the Counter-Reformation. Then there’s all the architecture of cathedrals, which is fantastic as well. In theory, the church also should be more forcefully talking about the importance of volunteerism–smart people like to worry about social problems and would support a religion truly dedicated to the poor and sick. On the other hand, smart people may realize that they can’t really help cure the world’s problems, so that might not be a good idea after all.

Finally, incorporate modern day works of art into the church. The type of thing I’m thinking is two-fold. For example, why not commission Don DeLillo to do a new translation of the Bible? Critics everywhere would praise it. The church should also acknowledge the work of modern day writers in a major way. Adding the works of Norman Mailer and Flannery O’Connor (at least the stories about priests and religion) to the Canon of divinely inspired books would get all those academics who dislike Catholicism to admit that, maybe, they’re on to something now.

The church could also do some clever, post-modern references to popular culture, drawing in the smart kids who like their entertainment and knowledge meta. For example, consider this part of the Passion, rewritten to match the music of Radiohead’s “Creep”:

CHRIST (on the cross)

I’m the Christ

I’m the Savior

What the hell am I doing here?

I don’t belong here

PARISH

He’s rising up again

He’s rising up

He lives, lives, lives

Get the likes of Outcast, Del the Funky Homosapien, and Dave Berman to write new lyrics for hymns and the youth will come running.

You see, right about now, the Catholic church is pretty effed. It might as well just give up trying to be inclusive and going back to the exclusive, snobby religion it once was. At least then I didn’t worry about my little cousin becoming an Altar Boy.

So here I am, 2:18 in the morning, and I’m entirely blocked on writing, well, anything. Can’t deal with the fiction, can’t deal with the paper, can’t deal with the responses to the short stories I’m supposed to be writing for later today. I’m screwed, basically.

So what do I do in this situation? Just about what anyone else would do in this situation: work on something entirely different. In this case, it’s my website. Considering I haven’t done anything for it in ages, it’s about time I got back to it. The idea is that the juices will start flowing and continue flowing for a bit longer.

I’ve been working an extreme amount lately, so by the time I get off work I don’t want to do anything but laze around for a few hours. It’s not a good thing at all. By the time I try to crack down and start my work (which, regardless of whether it’s entirely a good thing or not, now revolves around words that describe rather than issue instructions), I’ve wasted too much time to get anything done. Or I’m too tired to put together a coherent sentence. Currently, I’ve had to go back and delete something about every other word I’ve written, which is not a good thing when you’ve got a lot to write. It’s also not a good thing when you’re working in notepad again, which doesn’t have anything fancy like a “spellchecker” to tell you when things have gone wrong.

Anyway, there’s no need for random stuff like this, which is boring. Hopefully I can get my act together in regards to writing regularly, even if it is just more tripe on the web that no one wants to read. The idea is to do more stuff like reviews, fictional stuff and, yes, the Short Humor Essays that I haven’t written in a long time (and has a better reputation than they deserve credit for. Tonight, however, is just playing around with HTML again some. And yes, there’s a very good chance that this is the last time I’ll update this for another month and a half. There’s also a very good chance that no one else is reading this. But whatever. None of that really matters. Stuff always happens eventually, and if it doesn’t happen here, there’s a whole internet full of it that you can go read.

And for those of you who miss the quick, one-line observational humor things I used to do:

Five years and three months since I first posted something to the web and I still can’t get a date.