Scribble
by Andrew Segedin

 I wish I'd been born sometime else.  Anytime else.  I wish I'd been on the dance floor for the first notes of the Jazz Age or had a beer with a beatnik.  Perhaps my curly shag would have served me well in the ‘60s, I could have grown a mustache for the ‘70s, and teased all of it out for the ‘80s.  Lennon vs. Dylan, Zeppelin vs. ABBA, one-hit wonders vs.  Motley Crew.  Who would I have followed?  What would I have done?  Instead I am here and now, which is fine for the purposes of this scribble, because in my time and place – my generation – contentment is taboo.

My generation: we're a people of causes, politics, outrage.  We have Darfur, The Jena 6, no injustice greater than that of Fox canceling "Arrested Development."   We organize groups on various social networking sites and buy t-shirts.  All of it makes for lovely party conversation.  We're politically, economically, and socially aware.  We know things, but it doesn't end there.  We like movies.  Love movies.  We've seen them all.  We've seen movies you've never even heard of.  Back where I'm from in North Jersey, we'll drive an hour to see a movie that isn't at the local Megaplex.  We'll take the bus into New York.  We've seen all of your movies too.  Especially that horror movie that looked too cheesy to pass up -- reminded us of a particular low-budget zombie movie from the ‘70s.  Here, Michael Bay doesn't exist. 

We live for music.  We bleed it.  We've learned all the rules through osmosis.  They're called records.  There hasn't been a good A-side track since 1986.  We've stopped looking.  In fact, my generation, we're all musicians.  We all have blisters on our fingers from playing the guitar or sweat stains on our favorite t-shirt from playing the drums so damn hard.  We sing a little, but not very well.  Nobody plays bass.  We're all in a band, were in a band, are starting a band, or help out with a best friend's band.  Those of us who were never good, or were good but were screwed over by the rest of the band, or see the futility in making music – we mix.  We D.J.  We'll open our own independent recording studio someday.  All of our equipment is either custom made and shipped from out west or bought dirt cheap in a warehouse in Queens.  I'll send directions.

In my generation, the population of Brooklyn is in varying states of infinity.  We all live there, have friends who live there, wish we could live there, and spend every waking second there until the last L-train "home."  We've been sucked in by the quasi-hipster/quasi-bohemian handbooks of life.  We're all poor, but not that poor.  We wear gaudy sweaters and bright colored pants.  Our apartments are stripped down wood and exposed brick and pipes.  Bare - save an Audrey Hepburn poster and personal library.  We're a people of gimmicks.  We all know the girl with the pseudo-Neo-Nazi haircut who is practically an expert on 1980s underground punk bands from Tulsa.   We all know the sensitive guy who's seen every German silent movie ever made.  That's "our thing."  Our shtick.  We get it.  It seems as though we're in constant competition to prove who's the most peculiar.  Who knows the most about nothing.  It's like two queen bees battling in a counter-pop culture game of Trivial Pursuit.  The winner is the first to get called when Chuck Palahniuk comes to town for a book signing.

When attending a party in this generation one must know the rules.  "Playlists" are of the utmost importance.  Only candid photos are allowed, which is to say "posing" is forbidden.  Pictures are taken with old pawn-shop cameras or a brand new Nikon and edited into over-exposed, abstract delights.  Beer at said parties is either of the cheapest variety (why spend a lot of money on booze?) or imported from somewhere in Belgium, Italy, or Vermont (why drink stuff that isn't good?).  Inevitably you'll have some nincompoop in the corner drinking a cheap bottle of scotch or gin that he brought while pretending he's Humphrey Bogart.  If you want to go outside to smoke a cigarette they're called "bogies" – or "boges."  We hand roll our own or smoke Pall Malls.  They're cheap and Vonnegut smoked them.  There are enough slang terms for various drugs and corresponding paraphernalia to fill pages by themselves and if you're losing track you can get the hell out.

This doesn't necessarily make us bad people.  We're not.  We're society's willing losers.  We pump gas, wait tables, and stand behind cash registers all day.  You see people here who had bad childhoods.  Kids who had to go away on weekends, whose parents couldn't pay the bills, whose Dad up and left for this reason or that – and you get this army of people who don't want "real" jobs or families for the rest of their lives.  You have a bunch of overwhelmed, overmedicated twentysomethings who want to play forever.  Growing up has lost all of its appeal.  We've seen what's down that road.  So we look into the past and faces stare back telling us that there hasn't been a great movie since Brando got too fat and that the Great American Novel is an oxymoron.  And then where are we?  It's true. We don't have Vietnam or the Beatles at Shea.  We're a generation in the middle – with too much tragedy to ignore and not enough to matter.  We're just looking for our equivalents to the past.  So we claim this little corner of civilization as our own – somewhere out of the grasps of hair gel, "Chug Life" tattoos, and what came before.  It doesn't matter so much that we're loud, obnoxious, and mostly wrong.  We, like this scribble, are a contradiction.  We don't care.  We see it as a fair trade for a place in time and immunity from being ignored.

We're also not stupid.  At least I'm not.  We're not fresh or original.  Three-thousand years ago adolescent Israelites were probably told by their elders that their successes and struggles may have seemed important, but they didn't wander the desert for 40 years.  It's been this way ever since – with practically every other generation wondering where the hell they fit.  Up in the peanut gallery, my father would yell that he was too young to fight in Vietnam or drive out to San Francisco to wander Haight Street and see "The Stones" at Candlestick.  He was my age in the late ‘70s.  His generation's great crisis was with gasoline.  How history repeats itself.  My mother, who was my age in the mid-80 still burns herself CD mixes of "Styx" and "Aqualung."  She worked odd jobs until I was 10.  Why wouldn't she?  She was so young.  Youth is sort of like (oh god, here we go with the imagery) a really fast, awful rollercoaster ride.  You're going too fast to see what's around you, you're sick for most of it, and you can't wait to get off until the ride abruptly stops and it's time for somebody else to go on.  We want to be able to tell the next generation how we yelled and fought and partied and yet here we are dizzy on opiates playing Xbox 360 on the weekend – again.  Was it always supposed to be like this?

I don't know the answer.  I think about it and I get sick.  I found a gray hair in my beard the other day.  Diagnosed myself with the plague, gave myself three years to live.  I do know that we're on a slippery slope and that I can't very well continue drinking Seagram's and Tums smoothies until then.  So what's left?  Well, we could all start wearing "Where's the Beef?" t-shirts and Members Only jackets.  I'm sure we could get an army of Pintos for real cheap.  Line them up – drive them up the Turnpike and onto 495 and drive past Shea one last time before they knock it down.  We can smoke "real" expensive cigarettes – you don't even have to be a smoker.  We can reprogram our "playlists" – leave out Side B of "Darklands" and replace it with the Barenaked Ladies' greatest hits.  We can be basic and cliché and take this whole contradiction thing so much further, who'd be the wiser?  We can start a pop-revolution.