New Writing

Here's a single session piece I wrote before bed the other night:

What a vague, terrible time we live in.

I ride my bike to work and picture a future where there are no new cars, just rusted out hulking suvs that burn expensive fuel and pollute the already polluted streets. It feels like this is the beginning of something real actually happening. You can feel it. People are nervous. Even the weather is erratic. The delicate balance as they say has been knocked off kilter, and is slowly spiraling downward towards chaos.

At least it feels that way.

There's nothing more pathetic than an empire in decline, and thats how I feel the first of October two-thousand and eight. Even when I drop all the politics I still have an ugly, vapid culture staring me back in the face. There's no surprise that real greed is even more painful and damaging then what's in the movies. Real greed pushes this entire country off the edge of a cliff with nothing to do about it but sit back and occasionally blog. My generation is too busy updating its damn facebook to look around and realize that the america that they grew up in is changing and falling behind the rest of the world.

A few months ago I read the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. There's great emphasis in the later books about the empire's decline, about its shabby fall into physical and intellectual decay. It's weird that I can see little examples of that here and there, little cracks in the facade of the richest nation on earth.

Even the homeless population in Boulder seems to have grown a bit, favoring the young and desperate. Why get a job that takes money out of your meager paycheck when you can panhandle and keep one hundred percent of your profits? Some of the street performers make hundreds of dollars a day, and even the least pathetic looking vagrant is bound to get a least a few bucks every couple hours. And they just get to sit around getting high and talking shit with their other street kid friends. We call them mall kids, and avoid eye contact at all costs, except for the occasional sneer. But how are they any less american than I am? They're living on terms that they alone brokered, like cowboys in the old west. Except their horse is a pipe and the mall is their sunset. But anyway, this population has always been here, regardless of whats happening with the economy.

I guess that I should be glad I have a job, even though I hate it, and I should be glad that I at least make the same amount of money that I did a year ago. But I need more. I need to relegate this unpleasantness to my early twenties and be done with it. I need to be paid for doing what I'm good at, and I'm starting to figure out what that is.