millenial manifesto

i sit down all day at work, begging to scrape myself off my chair for a two minute walk to a twelve minute drive to lie down for four hours awake with a laptop on my chest followed by eight hours asleep with nothing on my mind. there is something wrong. this is not something that you can dispute. is my need to stand up and stretch my legs revolution? then i am born again in my adulthood: natural rebellion.

I am afraid, though, because I see that the rest of us are a fragile lock of glass. You can drop it in the keystone and watch the tumblrs unwind and unlock, discussion our rock against problems that probably won't stop - chief among them a ticking of a terrible clock that creaks towards hangover from the vocal treaty of low harmful garble on social media. We've had our fill of vigor and we're tired of vim this isn't the fifties the seventies or the sixties-we've figured out exactly how to effectively sin and now, well, we're simply not always interested.

We're meta. In terms of cool, we're better. You think your generation had swag? Think it was perfectly unique, subcultures coupled heroically like some lesser work of Shakespeare? The cliffnotes of your generation's swag fits in my girlfriend's handbag, youth. We bagged all your swag. We stole that shit or bought it from a thrift store or straight up made a better version ourselves. We took all the best parts of the brief history of American cool and now we wear them every day. Better, we know what they meant to you and they mean something similar to us, because we read about you and watched documentaries and learned how you thought. We especially learned where you made your mistakes and we’re avoiding them. You see us addicted to crack? You see us addicted to heroin? You see us on our college campuses getting shot by the national guard? Nah, you see us having a rad time at Occupy Wallstreet, half of us wilin' because we're drunk and high and the other wilin' because we're THERE doing HISTORY.

The funny thing is, we know our history so well that we're trapped in one of those hilariously wrong conceptions of time periods that comes with studying too much and seeing too little of reality: we see ourselves as a collected group. We see ourselves as a period of time. We see ourselves as a group of lines marked out of time, inevitably moving towards the construction of a decade's aesthetic. We're meta. We're meta as fuck. We have taken a step backwards and now we’re seeing a bigger picture. We’re seeing ourselves as we suppose others see us now and how time will probably see us. We’ve begun the self-fulfilling prophecy of youth in America.

Well, we thought so, anyway. Not to play the silly goose but to toss out a wild gander I suspect we can’t see the party for all the hipsters. Rather than the players we’re the audience watching ourselves, and out of the mess we’re the ones getting played. Sitting and waiting like a captive theatre audience, waiting for the dramatist’s tragedy to unfold, we forget that the story doesn’t write itself! Where’s our bildungsroman? Which one is our struggle? Is it war? Rape culture? Class struggle? The answer: there is none. We chase cool, and cool is made up.

Cool holds us together. Cool doesn’t exist. Since there's nothing holding us together, we're breakable. We’re the glass lock sitting in a solo cup of keystone; rip us out of the keystone and bang us against the hard wooden table of employment and all you’ve got is a bunch of broken, scattered shards. Realistically, we’re Milwaukee’s best, a roaring and shitty city with a high alcohol content. What’s left after the hangover? Just a town you don’t want to live in filled with people you don’t want to know.

You’re vexed, now. You’re upset. Cool doesn’t exist? Then what the fuck is a leather jacket? Shut up. Now, take the thirty-two year old hipster. Shit, take the twenty-eight year old hipster. These are people who should have fucking grown up by now and done something besides chasing what’s popular and redefining what makes cool. Why? Because when they grew older than twenty seven, they automatically became the antithesis of what’s cool. Look, don’t bother to argue. You know it’s as true as I do. Being young is cool. People who are old can’t fucking hang after a while. It’s just how things work. You may remember that creeping feeling of becoming a creep; that feeling is the slow and not-so-gentle feeling of becoming a person who supports themselves and later will support the weight of the next generation of youths. You become a creep because when you’re pulled off of the backs of the old and the next generation is piled on your back, the youth suspects your next move will be to drag them into employment to share your heavy load and therefore identifies you as their future potential oppressor. That’s where you lose your cool: when you become a future potential oppressor, as decided by the youth. That’s because we’re the youth and we build the cool. We tailor the cool to us and we keep it. You, old person, abuse and misuse and trick us into becoming like you and slowly we do. Under threat of starvation we get jobs. Under the onerous weight of 55 hour work weeks necessary at $17 an hour, we strive for promotion. Promotion means compliance. Promotion means forgetting your politics. Promotion means (eventually) corporate Stockholm Syndrome. And through all of this, the thing that keeps us going is the cool, until work becomes the focus of our lives. This usually occurs around 27. In the past, the cool has not faded, but rather has been replaced in importance by work, that thing in our society which gives you the right to be alive past the age of 27. Cool is replaced in importance but not memory; cool is the thing the older generations remember about their past, what keeps them together now that they’ve forgotten all the things they thought were important BACK IN THE DAY. Cool is what made the generations; cool is what kept them together.  

And that’s what’s going to work out for us, pretty soon, and then we won’t have our cool anymore, and then what will we have? Nothing. So we’re a pretty glass lock for now, floating in a glass of amber. And some of us sit wage slaves monday through friday and float on the weekends. And maybe later we’ll look back and wish we stretched our legs.

This is no heaven; that will be when everyone dies over the age of twenty seven. But that's a joke just like everything else it turns out there was no cool even in hell and the only thing left is writing the next book on the shelf for another generation that doesn't know the history of its self. but in the leg stretch there's still that thought best the one that makes me think maybe there's a hope yet and maybe it's not you but maybe it is so sit down and wait for me baby let's fit                                                 some thoughts in