Letter to a Young Zoomer

The Crisis

None but the brave deserve the fair.

—Ben Franklin, apocryphal last words.

A dying man can do nothing easily.

—Ben Franklin, actual last words.

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I remember before turning thirty, I used to stay up all night doing nothing—just biting my nails and watching my life pass, grabbing for any frame of reference to hold on to, which, at the time, meant books written by dead people who were around the same age as me.

First novels—The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, This Side of Paradise, Other Voices, Other Rooms—anything by a writer in their mid-twenties. I would flicker through the Wikipedia pages of the authors—Stein, Baldwin, Hemingway, Wolfe, Didion, Capote—and look at their birthdays, then scroll down in the biography and try to figure out what they were doing when they were my age.

What they were doing was what I felt I should be doing.

But what I was doing was different from what they were doing. Most of them were already grown-ups. Most were married. They had been to war. They had worked steadily at many jobs. They had many written articles and first books.

I didn’t know what to do or where to start with my life, so I just voyeured their lives, hoping they could provide some kind of guidance to my present.

Capote had already finished books, as had Fitzgerald. Wolfe didn’t publish anything big until he was twenty-nine, but it packed all the steam and emotion of twenty-nine years into one great masterpiece. Hemingway put out a couple of measly stories and poems, the featherweight of the group, but hell, he was still published and had benefactors. Most didn’t get really get going until they were twenty-five. I guess for a lot of people that’s when it really starts to set in—you’ve explored your options, and it’s time to start working on the thing that you’re going to do.

I had some time, just a little bit, what was I waiting for? Why was I obsessing over the mile markers of the dead?

I never thought as much about time as when I was twenty-three, feeling like I was standing on the cusp of something big and horrible that I had to resolve—and quickly.

+++

The first crisis, the first confusion and indecision or panic of a soul coming into conflict with itself and the world, with luck or fate, always seems so incredibly urgent. If I resolve this, if I do the righteous thing, I can still win this thing, there's still time! the soul tells itself.

Some, at this great tipping point, risk it all and rise. They somehow intuit the right moves in advance and act.

Others—the timid, the undecided, the pragmatic—put Band-Aids on the wounds and fall down, careening from one thing to the next, cliff after cliff after cliff—age sixteen, age twenty-one, age twenty-six, age thirty-three—crisis after crisis, each thing building on the thing before it, the whole monstrosity becoming both unspeakable and embarrassing. And just when they think it’s over, they fall another ten feet.

I sat in the gloamy darkness of a bus hurtling from Baltimore to New York City up the eastern seaboard looking through the rain-smudged window at a vast netherworld of factories and industry and blinking red lights and smoke on the edge of the highway’s stop-and-go traffic. Hidden behind it was the foggy mountains and islands of the Delaware Bay. Sunday night in 2013, the text messages were coming in on my smartphone, and I was surrounded by people also on their devices, iPads and iPods, all quiet and speaking to no one, the only sound was the rain and nails-on-the-blackboard squeal of the windshield wipers.

And I knew that I had been in this place before, made this damned journey before, and in a moment of awareness, I saw I was already dead, just one of endless souls being ferried around in purgatory by Charon.

There had been moments to escape, secret rabbit holes and tunnels to slip through that had appeared and disappeared, like those black holes in Wile E. Coyote cartoons, but I had marched forward, refusing to give up what I had gotten so far, crisis begetting crisis, until, as a wiser man could have seen, things had become complicated.

There is a great line buried deep in Raymond Chandler’s first film, The Blue Dahlia: “Just don’t get too complicated, Eddie. When a man gets too complicated, he’s unhappy. And when he’s unhappy, his luck runs out.”

One door closed on the left and the other door closed on the right and I found myself trapped in an airtight chamber, walled in, invisible to the young on one side, but not yet old—I marched on in lockstep and did not want to get pent up or stop because if I stopped I was afraid my fate—my shadow—would turn and run off.

And what is a person if they have lost their shadow and their fate, the only true things in life?

The bus careened through the concrete canyons and through a tunnel and popped up in the vast metropolis of swarming humanity and I stepped off the bus and I felt revived by the city, by all the businesses, the accessibility of low-grade corporeal pleasures. And I made my way through the crowds in the city that I lived in but didn’t feel at home in. And I very much just wanted to take a cab through the rain back to my apartment, but as I wandered the streets looking for a cab, it seemed unlikely. So, I found myself heading toward the subway at 34th and Penn Station, getting on a fluorescent train with strangers, and going home. When I got home, I would take a warm bath, phone a friend, watch episodes of funny TV shows, and read a section of a book that I had found on previous readings to be true.

The next day, I would go to work. For years, I had been doing what trapped people do—sleepwalking. People who either don’t have the courage, or are too pragmatic, or do not believe in their own ability to affect the outcome of things and feel themselves ghostly and lost.

I was waiting for something to happen to me. For a phone call. For something, anything, to help me. All while engaging in any temporary salve, pain-reducing behaviors available.

+++

The young people say:

We’re the first who have ever been here.

We’re the first to ever feel this way. We’re unique among the generations, actually.

It’s extremely urgent for us—and really, really bad.

The world is literally ending. And we’re the first to ever say that and for it to be real.

This is the kind of thing young people say. It's what young people have always said. But the young never realize things they're saying are the same thing the young have always said, they always believe they're the big exception.

If you shrug and say to them, “It’s not as bad as all that, just wait it out” you can feel their visceral horror, every bone in their body saying:

Sure, it might be fine for YOU (you’re old and your body is already dying)

but for ME

it’s a C R I S I S (a crisis!)

I can still make it!

I’m not going to end up like you, old and out of the game. I’m going to stay in the game. I’m going to make different decisions while the time is still ripe and I’m still in line with fate.

And they're quietly thinking:

It’s your own fault, you forsook yourself, you only have yourself to blame, you are like all the other adults—a negative example not to follow.

+++

Each generation gives up in its own way. Each grapples with the same demons and weaknesses. The boundless hope and enthusiasm that springs forth like a green shoot from the seed of youth (the seed of all life) inevitably rots and turns in on itself: bitterness, resentment, the fetid swamp of stagnation.

For the adult, even though each moment arrives fresh, vacuum-sealed from the factory of time, their senses have dulled to the possibilities, nothing is new to them and all smells like repetition. Each moment is stillborn, dead before it hits the water.

+++

I feel that the young people today, they’re both wiser and more cynical than I was, but deeply alien. They eat right, they save money, they don't drink, they don't party, they don't have sex. They hang out at the gym and look at themselves in the mirror. They think that if they’re not perfectly sculpted, no one will fuck them or love them. They want to work high-paying jobs, secure their bag, and then get out. They're buying up Sublime and Pearl Jam shirts like they're going out of style.

All warm, human things—parties, shows, interactions?—fetish objects, nostalgia for a time they can’t remember. Nostalgia for 2006. For me, by 2006, everything felt already halfway on the way to being over.

They seem so anxious, so afraid of fucking up, so controlled by fear.

And it's a crisis. It's always a goddamn crisis. I remember the bemused looks on the older people’s faces when they patiently heard me out, listening to my "problems" and now I'm that guy, patiently listening to the children's so-called problems.

Little do the young realize that:

a) Life is just ever-expanding crises until you're dead.

b) As a friend once presciently said to me when we were in our twenties: "Go for it! Live to the hilt now, my friend, because our thirties, forties, and fifties will be about being slaves to our loved ones."

Turned out he was right. Happy slave, but slave nonetheless. A slave to: our bodies, our kids, our aging parents, our siblings, our friends, our significant others.