Party's Over

Or the death of elder millennial whimsy.

I think I remember the last time I was Young. I was literally a man outstanding in a field near my parents home in upstate New York a few days before the United States Government announced travel restrictions being in put in place for that Chinese respiratory virus.

I was wearing a tartan-patterned flannel shirt, light wash denim jeans and polarized Wayfarer’s special ordered to be the exact extra large size Don Johnson wore in Miami Vice. I remember because I took a selfie, somehow knowing, that this was the beginning of the end of Fun.

Over the years, the smiles, spontaneity and over-indulgence gradually became more muted amongst my friends and lovers. The timbre in usually vivacious voices shifted a few octaves down—a cancer scare, death of a parent, the loss of something more ephemeral made the text message response time gradually slow. The willingness to meet up waned and suddenly I was 40 with not a lot of people in my life. Granted, there were many justified reasons for this that weren’t solely the fault of the Central People’s Government of the People’s Republic of China—and Democrats—but I couldn’t help but feel robbed of my mid-30s as I struggled through this dark time of Apex loneliness. Stalked by the consequences of my emotional ambivalence towards women and comrades I should have given more respect towards.

Concurrently, I’d have to assume, the young Gen-Z children locked in their rooms doubly-affixed to their screens developed a more potently warped view of reality and interaction than I ever could of nightmared. We, the Elder Gods, saw both the before and after of an Analog World. Where phone calls were the norm and suddenly—were not. In this primordial isolation, deprived of tactile seductions in the form of awkward finger-fucking and sweat drenched dance parties at absent affluent parents abodes, they crafted unrealistically socially distant pristine versions of themselves through Snapchat avatars and Instagram political posturing. It was existence without risk in a reality where the outside world was fraught with it—why wouldn’t they eschew the directness my generation was so familiar with? Clapping? Too aggressive, use your thumb and index finger.

Still, they possessed a quiet indignation that seemed to dominate the political discourse. Quick to accuse and demonize, but rarely willing to plant feet and lock antlers over an issue unless it was in a digital landscape where gotchas and whataboutisms equated victory—or simply screaming when your point made too much sense. Too cold, pointed and penetrating of their affirming blanky of digital moral righteousness. Seldom could you hold direct eye contact and ask them to explain their perspective in any nuanced form without triggering a reptilian low-road fight or flight response. Molded, as they were, into an algorithmic structure of right and wrong, which curiously ran contrary to their multi-variant world of gender fluidity to which I cast no shade, just…curious. I type these words and I sense you and their eyes glazing over as the neurons deploy to that long lengua in your head to fire forth, “Okay boomer” (an idiom already dated as of this writing) or worse yet an indictment of being “a moderate” which was back in the analog days was simply what we called…Logical.

But I couldn’t just blame those damn kids. It was my contemporaries too. A trillion concurrent narratives firing through our neurons at once like a pollack work painted in brain matter. I remember lively political discourses—okay they were drunken sloppy screamfests at a cocktail bar in Kingston, New York. Still, underneath it all there was an underpinning of Good Sport. A match. A game with rules we were all loosely aware of. Now, those same people, merely attempting to ask a question to better understand the subject matter which I doubted they were anymore acutely versed in than I, resulted in pursed lips and narrowing of eyes flanked by a few more wrinkles than the last time we did this in 2017, Helen. Politics were so coiled around our spinal cords like freshly hatched Xenomorphs that any attempt to extricate the self from the ideology made it squeeze tighter. Choking the joy out of the thing I valued most: conversation.

“It’s literally genocide,” she said while we waited for the next round of Negronis.

“Literally?” I asked, in earnest. I didn’t know, I saw some posts and videos of mangled babies. It looked like a fucked war, but I didn’t know if or why Israeli’s hated Palestinians. Some twink at a lesbian bar, or maybe it was just a handsome transmasc, explained to me something about Palestinians and Arabs living happily—and gayly—in Israel or something. Were they disposing of them there too? Why not start at home first before branching out?

Now, I said none of this because the girl gave really good blowjobs and I was hoping she’d grace me with one of them again, but as her stare hardened into a glare and the Xenomorph coiled I realize this was going to be another evening of self-love.

So I stood in that field for a while and woke up in my late 30s having learned some painfully overdue lessons, trying desperately to inform my peers I was ready to be an adult—but they’d all moved on. Partying took too much of a physical toll, unpredictability induced too much anxiety and dreaming was a luxury only the most affluent of us could…well…dream to humor. I was dedicated to building a life where these things formed the trinity of existence, and in many ways, I had—a remote tech job, no wife or kids and a bit of residual twenty-something arrogance to keep climbing the comedy ladder. Unfortunately, this seemed to only engender resentment amongst those I still spoke to. Sideways glances and not so subtle passive aggressive retorts when sharing your remaining aspirations. M83, Radiohead, blah blah blah, all that good background music you never really paid attention to would now be your sullen lullaby as you drank alone scrolling through names on your phone you used to regularly hear from, squinting at the last text’s date and time—now too blurry to see without your Warby Parker readers.

Party’s over.