Then after I took the elevator upstairs I found myself in the atrium of an eight-story, vacant shopping mall. The only reason I could even see where I was going was because a few stores up front were still open and casting light, but ninety percent of the rest of the stores were dark and empty and foreboding. George A. Romero wouldn’t have to make a single change if he wanted to film another Dawn of the Dead movie here. That no one tried to eat my brain is nothing short of a miracle.
Which is why I can’t let this go.
I level my gaze. “Listen, I was in a six-thousand-pound SUV fifteen feet away from you right next to the sign that says VALET PARKING. I beeped, I waved, I sent up little smoke signals from the tepee in the backseat. Then, when I got out of the car to talk to you, you jumped into the car behind mine. When you came back, you ran over to the car next to me, yet you walked so close to my car that you set off my parking sensor. So, with all of these factors in mind, how do you claim to have not seen me?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know.” When he exhales, I smell Snoop Dogg’s tour bus. Ah, that would account for the slow blinking and vision obstruction and serves to piss me off more. Seriously, in an economy with people begging for jobs, this asshole thinks it’s kosher to get baked at work and then drive my car? [In theory, I mean.] Unacceptable.
I fight the urge to ask if he knows who I am.
Because I suspect that if I don’t walk away, who I am is the lady who gets her car shat in the next time she valets.
A·U·T·H·O·R’S N·O·T·E
When Douglas Coupland wrote Generation X, he was writing about me.
I mean figuratively, not literally.
I read Generation X in my second [Of six total.] senior year of college, in the time in which I briefly traded my loafers for Birkenstocks, khakis for flannel, and Wham! for Nirvana. As a poster child for all things considered “slacker,” [Including cynicism, apathy, and un-cute plaid shirts.] I clearly recall nodding my head and saying, “Yeah, man. You get it.”
Until I stumbled across Bridget Jones’s Diary six years later, I’d never identified more with a novel. Coupland gave voice to the ennui that every twentysomething felt at the time, back in the day when we were long on promise and short on opportunity. He understood us because he was one of us—trapped between the perpetual, collective optimism of those he labeled “Global Teens” [Later characterized as Generation Y or the Millennials.] and their Baby Boomer parents, our generation defined ourselves by… nothing.
Technically, that’s not true. Our generation defined ourselves by our perpetual fear of a Soviet invasion, playing Cold War mixtapes on our Walkmen. Oh, Sting, we’d lament, we also hope the Russians love their children, too. If iPods were around back then, we’d have had entire thermonuclear war playlists, filled with songs like “99 Luftballons,” “Wind of Change,” and “Toy Soldier.”
Before John Hughes made them household names, we had Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy in War Games trying to persuade a Soviet supercomputer via dial-up modem that the only way to win a nuclear war is not to play.
We had Red Dawn and a pre–Dirty Dancing Jennifer Grey carrying not a watermelon, but an AK-47.
We had “Wolverines!”
Then, just like that, the Cold War ended and we lost the one thing that made our generation unique.
Those of us born between 1965 and 1980 had none of the benefits of the generations that came before or after us. We know nothing of the kinder, simpler America from the Camelot days, nor were we born with an innate understanding of how to operate Microsoft Windows.
Today, we’re a beeper generation in a smartphone world.
Complicating matters is that neither the generation that came before us nor the one that’s come after has demonstrated any real desire to act like adults themselves. Financial planning advertisements show Baby Boomers running away from corporate life to pursue dreams that, in this economy, are downright ridiculous. This is not, in fact, the time to quit your job with your 401K and health insurance to go build custom boats. I know Dennis Hopper told everyone it was okay, but he’s dead now. [And he had the kind of cash and cachet only Hollywood could create.]
On top of that, we’ve got folks in their late twenties to early thirties so wrapped up in quasi-political Facebook friend requests and Spotify and Farmville that Soviet troops could actually roll down Main Street and they’d never even notice. Or care.
Of course this doesn’t pertain to every member of Generation Y, [Baby Boomer, for that matter. Or you, no matter what your generation, as you’ve shown remarkably good sense in having picked this book.] but it’s not that far-fetched either. Um, hey, Counselor, can you stop streaming Gilmore Girls on Netflix long enough to present your case to the jury? KTHXBAI.
Watching this generation operate makes me very glad that people my age understand that tools like technology and social media are a means to an end and not the end itself.
My generation didn’t play soccer so we know that when the game is over, not everyone gets a trophy. Yet here we are, trapped in middle management between two massive cases of generational arrested development.
And what we’ve determined from watching everyone else is that deciding to grow up has been our ultimate act of rebellion.
So that’s what those of us in Generation X have done to define ourselves. We’ve become the only adults in a world full of children.
I mean, if I could finally grow up? Anyone can.
Maybe I’ve moved to the dark side, but it’s clean and nice and we never run out of toilet paper. And honestly, getting here wasn’t that hard. All I had to do was make the conscious decision
