I have a New Year’s Day routine, where I get a taxi to Newark Airport at the crack of dawn, then I eat breakfast in the “secret” Terminal C restaurant behind Gate 120.
The food is the same crap you order off an iPad at every other restaurant in Terminal C, but it costs a little more and comes with a better atmosphere.
And so here I am as the sun seeps through cracked gray haze, watching a long line of lights in the sky—planes on their landing approaches. Each carries hundreds of people, all having individual experiences, all burdened with their own circumstances determining their optimism or sadness as they approach the passage of time.
My particular burden is I’m the walking definition of Gen X, in a way. The bridge generation between old ways and new ways. I am ambivalent about many things, came of age to indie rock in a world where entitled people always won and we less-entitled knew we were screwed, because we weren’t those people. Counterculture wasn’t cool when I eked out my own definition of how I would live to no one else’s standards. I’m so Gen X, my name’s in the Slacker credits.
Of course, so is everyone else’s of a certain era.
So I’m a bridge. That means I will never quite make it myself. My job is to make things easier on my successors. Life is easier once you acknowledge this and relieve yourself of the pressure of having to master the world. And it’s not a conscious choice so much as an awareness the world has only superficially changed.
The game is rigged. We were all set up, our fate predetermined by class, gender, race, identity. The masters of the universe are still the masters of the universe. I’m still a tenant farmer who stands back and looks at a great harvest, then sees the king’s newest knight, the one who has never been in battle and never earned a damn thing, cruise in and tell me what a great harvest it is and how he looks forward to the day he is king.
So as I sit on the morning of a New Year, watching the ping come in about my flight being delayed, realizing I’m not getting upgraded as I have the last three New Year’s flights, and my seats on the left of the plane so I won’t see the Grand Canyon, I realize and resolve.
I can burn that garden, can’t I?
I can’t think of a better example for the next generation.
The food is the same crap you order off an iPad at every other restaurant in Terminal C, but it costs a little more and comes with a better atmosphere.
And so here I am as the sun seeps through cracked gray haze, watching a long line of lights in the sky—planes on their landing approaches. Each carries hundreds of people, all having individual experiences, all burdened with their own circumstances determining their optimism or sadness as they approach the passage of time.
My particular burden is I’m the walking definition of Gen X, in a way. The bridge generation between old ways and new ways. I am ambivalent about many things, came of age to indie rock in a world where entitled people always won and we less-entitled knew we were screwed, because we weren’t those people. Counterculture wasn’t cool when I eked out my own definition of how I would live to no one else’s standards. I’m so Gen X, my name’s in the Slacker credits.
Of course, so is everyone else’s of a certain era.
So I’m a bridge. That means I will never quite make it myself. My job is to make things easier on my successors. Life is easier once you acknowledge this and relieve yourself of the pressure of having to master the world. And it’s not a conscious choice so much as an awareness the world has only superficially changed.
The game is rigged. We were all set up, our fate predetermined by class, gender, race, identity. The masters of the universe are still the masters of the universe. I’m still a tenant farmer who stands back and looks at a great harvest, then sees the king’s newest knight, the one who has never been in battle and never earned a damn thing, cruise in and tell me what a great harvest it is and how he looks forward to the day he is king.
So as I sit on the morning of a New Year, watching the ping come in about my flight being delayed, realizing I’m not getting upgraded as I have the last three New Year’s flights, and my seats on the left of the plane so I won’t see the Grand Canyon, I realize and resolve.
I can burn that garden, can’t I?
I can’t think of a better example for the next generation.
1 comment:
Very deep.
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