That’s Who
I do not know you,
as if ever one could,
you in the bible cover
under onion skin,
but always they called you Little Chistine
the last and the tiniest
that hollow leaf on the dead branch
when they spoke reluctantly about family.
That’s you.
It’s a spot with no picture,
a sprout barely green,
on a twig that had stretched its limit
petering out into the fathoms of an alternatively browning spine.
The ink still looks fresh for you
as inks do when they beckon
dots pronouncing where a loving hand sometimes hesitated
in your namesake cursive
silently screaming in indigo how you must be found.
That’s you.
I bring myself to the old coal town,
my first time where we’d kindled as Americans,
a tiny town for a tiniest you
home to little else than three churches and seven sprawling cemeteries.
There are more people dead here than living here
many of them ancestors
and my notebook is out
my sad, erasable pencil scratching forth and back as I
one by one
spot every one
all save for one.
That’s you.
Two broiling days
measured in faded headstones
hot to the touch
and I thirstily begin again
square one, grave one
in the cheat of dusk with a flashlight
overnight without a wink
and a third beginning come breakfast-time
because I must have missed you,
Little Christine.
My scour now less a pattern than a frenzy
knowing you are here
in an old and hollow space
around this bend or that
for which I grow feverish
the burn in my chest, the flames in my calves,
a sun sooner to crisp than to light a way
no closer to being able to say it.
That’s you.
Cruelly our memories neglect
and so bitterly the records repeat
with cantankerous blanks from the paper bomb
as much use as ash
and my frustrated temperature rises.
But then a small, Russian cross
carved in Ukrainian Cyrillic
a headstone sidelong on the path
well mossed and moist and cool in the shade
its figures hidden but for a few shadows from bulbous, stony creases.
I clear it apace with my burning hands
my forehead ablaze without and within
a flash and a rush
but I cannot read it.
This alphabet and I are strangers
its figures all melty and queer
waves of embossed, watery characters in granite
trying in vain to wash away one too many somethings
and then longing to tell me the tale
when stones became inks
going deftly unheard as it bellows out the unspoken story of a child
taken in her crib
taken in fire.
That’s you.
Recessing
The problem required a professional’s verification. The sheriff was insistent. Several safety-yellow, hydraulic brutes rolled over their garden. The cesspool cover was removed, ripe sewage tainting the air. A crew of five men took turns precariously balancing on the edge of the hole, shining lights and poking downward with poles. Last week’s moaning continued; sad, whalish, inhuman grousing. She presented now only as a plump, half-submerged, dark brown mass, strung between walls the way cheese pulls from hot pizza. But Gladys was a ward of the state and her sentence had not included the neighbors she’d wronged switching to vegan.
The Z Machine
I very strongly disagree with the manner in which our pop culture both misunderstands and then subsequently "misuses" generation names. First to note, these are not hard and fast categories. It is not like the naming of a generation comes from either an official need to do so or a traditional framework that happens according to certain parameters. Every state has a state bird, every U.S. President has some favorite snack on record, pretty much for the sake of lightheartedly knowing weird trivia like Ronald Reagan was the jelly bean president. It's as if to say, "We've tracked it before, therefore it's a thing we should always track." I’m not against that, but that’s not how it works with naming generations.
Widely started with Tom Brokaw's book, "The Greatest Generation" giving rise to that phrase popularly being attached to those who fought in WWII; referring to a generation by a collective name was neither something we'd traditionally tracked, nor something that was even a sociological measure. The name of a generation is basically a meme, repeated enough times that everyone knows the ad hoc reference. It’s a matter of multiple authors or speakers through multiple platforms throwing different names against a wall and not even anticipating which will stick. We treat the names of generations (and even what we might numerically consider to be half-step generations) as if there is science to it, as if there’s a cut-off date where one officially begins, and another officially ends. We treat the act as if there is some sort of official process a body of similarly aged persons is filtered through to arrive at a factual result. There is nothing official and almost nothing resultantly factual about it. Sure, it’s somewhat helpful to collectivize voting blocs by age and, if you do you, you’ll need a manner in which to refer to them in conversation. But beyond that, the name of a generation, the span of time it supposedly covers, and the manner in which we come by a name is all traditionally happenstance by design.
Some of the names that happened to stick (Greatest Generation, Baby Boomers, Me Generation) generally did so in presumed relation to observable and pan-applicable commonalities shared by the persons said to be part of that bloc. Greatest Generation, as a title, was a broad capture, associating folks by who’d lived in The Great Depression and then fought in that world war. Though broad, that was an easy one to understand because, globally, no one was untouched by those two world events.
Flimsily trying to use that touchstone as what makes a generation, the commonality factor, then we had the narrower commonality of Baby Boomers, people born in large numbers soon after the war when soldiers returned home and started families. I mean, I am quite certain that with very few statistical outliers, all those people had something more in common throughout the longest lives in recorded history, than the mere timing of their births, perhaps even predominantly so. While not everyone in that group would have been a greaser or a rock ‘n’ roll fan or a target for McCarthyism, that generation could have just as easily been named The Tail Fins Generation or the TV Generation or The Desegregation Generation. How bizarre the stretch to need to start naming groups by birth brackets and how much more bizarre the almost accidental stretch for commonality to reach the name “Baby Boomers?”
I begrudge no one their attempt to add a literary moniker to a group. But the rest of us have lost the plot. Naming a generation, as is now a new tradition, carries about as much weight as being born under a given constellation. It’s a forced preamble. When you hear of a generation by name, your mind would do well to temporarily rename it in your head to something like The Scorpio generation before discussing it. Do not draw suppositions from these titles.
In fact, if we put that happenstance design under a microscope, in absence of the, say, every-digit meaning that goes into something like a social security number or, say, a system by which we know when the ensuing year will be the Year of the Monkey; the few “practices” you can conclude that go into naming a generation are thus:
1) They tend to be based upon a perceived commonality
2) They tend to be named after-the-fact, often by people not part of that generation
3) While there is an unconscious acceptance of the name, the way there is of a meme, people belonging to that generation generally do not get to pick and choose their own group moniker.
4) We call it a whole generation, as if global, but the chosen names tend to be situationally limited to Americans.
Fast forward to the name that stuck with my generation, Generation X. There are scant few born later than us who even remotely know that Gen X was the name that stuck to us as Coupland’s book was trying to follow this oh-so-loose commonality tradition. We were called Generation X supposedly because there was no, one single commonality between us. The X was like an unknown in a math equation. In fact, “Generation X” was an older phrase borrowed from previous generations, back then meaning disenfranchised youth or alienated teens, a phrase originally intended to separate out a body of persons from the larger generational bloc; which, almost ironically, was first applied to the same generation we now call boomers. Shorthand, “Generation X” as a term was meant for “greasers,” but never stuck. Decades later, post Me Generation and/or Silent Generation, Coupland’s version stuck during a period of time when everything out of Hollywood was made to sound more exciting by use of an “X” (X-Files, American History X, the origins of Netflix, the film for Malcom X, X-Men, The Matrix, and for those who get the Stargate meta-reference, “Wormhole X.”). This newer version was a sort of anti-commonality describing mainly kids of the 70s and 80s as having no, one, big, shared factor that would define us in distinctive parallel against other groups, named or unnamed.
So, this is where the misuse and misunderstanding comes in. Gen Y and Gen Z were then “chosen” to follow Gen X, misinformedly so, as if there had been a Gen D, Gen E, and Gen F. There were not. The scotoma-adjacent grand explanation for the appearance of the new terms is a repeated, meme-driven supposition that the practice is derived from an implied sequencing, like naming this year’s hurricanes in alphabetical order or sticking decimal points after new releases of computer applications. Again, this had never been. Such ignores all four, now frequented, ingredients to how generations take on names: perceived commonality in the title, not getting to choose your own generational group name, an American focus, and getting named in some semblance of hindsight. That’s before we even mention that “Gen Y” and “Gen Z,” likewise, lack much of the “throw it against a wall and see what sticks” quality, among several options, as had been the case for others since we’d started the practice.
Gen Y, if there is such a thing, whether referred to that way or alternatively labelled as millennials, are only passively referenced, without any more meaning or identity than being in direct shadow of another generation, or in an even narrower, boomer-like, birth proximity to a specific, but almost numerically mundane date. They have a date-name that linguistically prescribes everyone born for about 99 years into a single millennial status, despite the arbitrary and wildly disparate year brackets assigned them, those generally topping out across all barely overlapping OPINIONS somewhere in the late 90s. It’s all accidental, but nonetheless hogwash! The youth of Gen Y and Gen Z deserve better.
Further, the quick-to-stick presumption that there is only sequencing and no meaning in naming a generation, the precept that gives us “Gen Y” as a term, effectively erases the once au courant and poignant gravitas of “Gen X.” It is as if what little identity GenXers would take from that title has been erased and forgotten. We were on track to be predominantly called The Slacker Generation, The Latchkey Generation, or the MTV Generation, the lot having to do with the perceived breakdown in family values and work ethic, all names that we seemed to accept as we grew up and proved them ironic or wrong. Yet we happily accepted “Gen X” and its actual meaning as this sort of badge. It was as if the observation of our collective dissimilarity was an indication that we’d finally reached a flexion point in American freedoms. We were an unboxable, undefinable, je ne sais quoi, accepting enough of all peoples that no one trait rose to the top as widely applicable. It is a name that we continued to proudly embody well into our adult years. It was a name that simultaneously flipped the script from previous groups, while coming about under the same accepted conditions.
Now, sequencing it into a small, meaningless enumeration, Gen X is suddenly not the last fortunate generation to have had deeper meaning in its label, mine even against a powerful backdrop of disproven prejudgments, but instead the first generation in our ever-more-passive acceptance of thinking as if we are machines. Do we need to name generations? No. Nor do we constellations or ships or songs. But there is this inherent marginalization that comes from ascribing a namelessness to any person or any group. And when that namelessness has the absent-minded power to look back from a forced void and thrust that emptiness onto other people, ideas, and mainstays, it’s not just a misunderstanding…it’s a revisionist history, a poorly applied presentism that seeks to define the past in terms of today, including the baseline premise that today’s definition is zero sum. This is not the act of being misinformed as much as it is the black hole equivalent of what it takes to remain uninformed.
My 16-year-old, born in 2007, and my 11-year-old in 2012, have a full-out argument about once every four months as to whether or not they belong to the same generation, always followed by the conclusion that they do not, and the ensuing, unavoidable “why my generation is better than yours” debate in anger. They are only four-and-a-half years apart. And it’s no wonder when they are pulling their evidences from varied teachers, citing varied look-ups, all with sporadic assignments of year brackets and pop confusion about which name might belong where on a timeline. Plus, there’s all the misapplications of similar look-ups across YouTube voices and TikTok videos. “Why” never comes into it.
Is it not more useful to append those new labels and instead talk about the possibility of a Pandemic Generation, tracing their collective gap in education and/or income out into the results of seasoned adult lives? How about the Generation of Political Divide, the slews upon droves of children in the millions raised during the most politically divisive and longest sustained 50/50 split in our governance in history? I could list a hundred possibilities, none of which changes who an individual is, what they face, or how they overcome. The point is that the blind and uninformed acceptance of a non-existent system yielding meaningless names, works against anything that would allow an applicable name to stick; works against that last bastion of passive, unilateral agreement that is everybody looking up from a book or paper or a broadcast or even an Instagram post and silently nodding to themselves, saying, “Yeah, yeah, that’s us.” One cannot hope to use a benign placeholder, now, and expect something better will automatically arrive to supplant it in the collective psyche. In a world where no 18-year-old can be provided the impetus to cross-reference beyond scanning the first couple sentences in each of the first two Google hits, the placeholder is their answer, their truth, their go-to, even when they do not know what the heck they are talking about. People have formed a comfortable, cognitive dissonance from their informational sources that functions much the same way that we’ve overwhelmingly distanced ourselves from our food sources. Using the term "Gen Z" is little different from ordering something from a menu that just says, "Meat."
Generations are strange, as we view them, collecting folks together in groups not by their true time on this Earth, but ultimately by their first twenty years. That’s quite the narrow gap in which to debate a shared start date and end date, particularly when there is disagreement. Then sometimes we skew the results around some linchpin commonality the way redistricting can either positively solidify voting blocs or disenfranchise them with an arbitrary line down the middle. The best thing we can do is to stop referring to present and future generations by letters and numbers and systems, and instead let them craft the umbrellas that will hang over all their heads until a decent, studied hindsight can identify what color that umbrella should be.
Uta Thalamus
Sometimes I need you to unlove me
so that you could find me again
after I’ve dusted myself off and crawled out of the impact crater
or at least my ghost
emerging from my bony, irradiated smithereens;
our chapters long since emptied out
all Uta Hagen, Siddhartha, and Roanoke
on the far side of closure
as if they’d filled a wastepaper basket,
its belly grumbling on three shreds of crumpled, loosed leaf
and the remainder a versicolor suffrage of stickier, more disgusting mutilations;
half an old Twinkie, a too ketchupped fork, a throat.
I think it would only hurt differently
than how you love me now
not more
differently as is the distinction between losing one’s sight and losing one’s eye.
Sometimes I need you to unlove me
in making a moment again when virtues came uncluttered and in a primal haste
when that old, electric touch
would stop you
and words were still a floodlight of promises
somewhere in that lush, ravishing precursor
when the aches of me had not yet become the pains of you,
before every atom was a disaster;
Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays marked on your calendar
to trumpet blame
drink a cheap coffee on-the-go
and leave the dirty lids where we keep the photo albums
letting them drool and spit onto the pinkest of our scars.
Tom thought to recapture his missing soul, though he couldn’t fathom how; a decade’s carefree insistence that a convivial relationship with his lounger, his warmest socks, and the pine frame containing his charcoal hydrangea, now proving less a delight than it was the expulsion of all living poetries within him.
Penalized
I am a writer. That means I hang my agony on a turn of phrase. Take all night to write this sentence and I am a bad husband. Take all day to write this sentence; I’m a selfish son of a bitch. Massage the predicate for a week, neglectful father. Every syllable crammed between my imagined, gothic drop cap and this so very lonesome a period gets scribbled and replaced, arranged iamb, remade dactyl, then trashed. Delete, delete, delete. Come one month, I can be sure my mother will be the last soul who’ll see any good left in me. At eight I’m disowned. If I take a year to write this sentence, I am invisible to everyone but God, and I will have given him no reason to even glance at me. Twenty-five of those, fixated, and I become that committable type of crazy. I am a writer. I am older than you think. This is my death sentence.
Each inverted shot glass trembled as David’s eighth slammed down with the tensest punctuation yet. The parade of them made him feel as if he wasn’t inebriating alone. Uno had been for pain, his dos the opening that attempted to decode the human heart. But by eight he was beyond the broken ghosts in Jocelyn’s bed, convincing himself more each second that this queerest of cats must certainly work for the CIA, all while staring directly at his dog.
She was smart, that brand of intellect that reveals a lifetime of cross-referencing footnotes and trusting microfiche reels more than Google hits. That made it all the more a shame when, after fifteen years, Carla had yet to figure out how every scoop of scat from the litterbox spelled out “cut the blue wire” in hexadecimal.
All I said was, “We’re not going to the vet,” and it was like she knew I was lying.
The entire team of engineers failed to grasp her orders. After all, until such time as one was stupid enough to fill the heavens with too many ships, there really was no reason to construct a reverse setting. This was space. Yet the he viewscreen’s image of Paula Deen preparing a turducken explained what their captain could not. They were on it.
“People of Earth, we come in peace to Mars as you are batshit crazy at home.”
“Yeah. Uh, we’re gonna have to change the whole first contact rulebook from warp signature, to like, whenever the hell those Earth people resolve corporate personhood.”
FDA. We bring you unfiltered Camels to help waste you through the eye of that needle.
Hey kids! FaDA Bear says, “Drink up on potato vodka. It’ll sterilize whatever we missed.”
"Well, we used to be the Food and Dildo Administration, but then someone dipped a strap-on in hot sauce and ruined it for everybody."
"I can’t come in today, Barbara. My wife and I had a fight and she freed my comfort marlin."
"Sarge, you’re not just my superior officer, you’re my best friend. I got this. I ride shotgun in your squad car everyday, sometimes to hell and back. Just like that I’m going to be there, at arm’s length, proud, when you and Margo take that plunge, bind yourselves to each other and start a new life together. I got your back just like you’ve always had mine. But which is more important right now? The 10-89 on Waylon and Main that’s probably a hoax, or the very real possibility that some grizzly is gonna scoop up the very salmon that leapt out of the stream and swallowed the ring?"
"Oh yeah, it’s a thing. You know how you can’t scuba dive and fly in the same 24 hours? You can’t go surfcasting and collate in the same day. People’s wrists have been know to disintegrate."
Though brave enough to take down yesterday’s bison with just a leap and a bone knife, Stone Walker grew increasingly concerned about that which was hiding in the corner, especially as he lived in the tribe’s roundest teepee.
"Look, it’s either that one-eyed, mouth-foaming ratzilla, or your mother, and if it’s the latter I refuse to go after it."
To the human onlookers, it was a horrifying series of clicks and glottal stops amidst the shrill and shrieking din that came from the bigger one’s unhinged jaw. What they didn’t know was that this was simply Spreeklottle getting chewed out by his commander for not having read his rapid colonization handbook, an oversight evidenced by Chapter 7 “The Planet of Rectangular Houses,” and the bloody mess at the recruit’s feet proving that he’d tried to hide in the coroner.
Grieve me elsewise,
but for a splatter of dirt
that thrusts all endings forward
and stacks me haughtily upon my predecessors' rot.
For this box,
scarcely as pretty from the inside,
ever grants me space enough to mourn the busiest you
in inches and in feet
the way I should have lodged into ventricles and valves,
missives and the pillow still dented on the far side of your bed;
when somehow I warranted only breadth enough
for the squelch of a single tear from one web-thin duct,
masterfully cracking away yesterdays,
making the good show,
and blinking immediately into your otherwise brimful dance card.