I'm society's fault.

The prodigal son wasted his substance with riotous living--trading in 'the good life' for some funny stories, cool scars, bad habits; maybe an embarrassing disease or two. One might imagine his elder brother occasionally romanticizing those adventures, staring into space on a dull day in the pasture, or after a round of fruitless bickering with his parents. It would be hard to live at home, nothing really your own until your father dies and gives it to you.

Surely he didn't envy the pleasures of the debauchery; but maybe the audacity, the wildness. I'll reiterate that I have no idea how a grown man could live at home until his parents died... although in those days I don't suppose you had to wait that long.

I wonder how our generation will be regarded by the Saxons, Amorites, Mongols, Incas, etc. with whom we'll inevitably mingle in the afterlife. I can only imagine how they'll interact with one another, but I bet they'll all agree that we are about as weird as humans can be, and still be considered human.

The thought occurred to me at work, as I listened to my iTunes; mouth dry, eyes unfocused, and utterly vulnerable to suggestion. My mind was active, but absent... like the times when you're exhausted and just about to fall asleep, or just about to wake up, and you can't tell the difference between conscious contemplation and dreaming, and you're almost totally oblivious to your surroundings. In that state, I was thinking about Kyra, and found myself possessed of radically fluctuating feelings, changing at intervals of 3 to 5 minutes--and realized that I was unconsciously absorbing the attitude of whatever song was playing at the time.

Of course that's an extreme example, but I don't think you could find any historical culture where the adage that 'life imitates art' could possibly be as applicable as in ours. Everywhere there's music playing, everywhere a television on; a constant stream of someone else's assumptions and ideas force-fed to us, almost from the womb. I grew up imitating the witty, passive-aggressive banter I saw on sitcoms; developing wildly unrealistic romantic expectations based on films where people meet, fall in love, and consummate their relationship in 90 minutes or less (with time for a dramatically-significant fight somewhere in there); and I don't know how much of my teenage unhappiness I can attribute to that, but it can't have helped.

"People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos; that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss... did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?"

Rob Gordon (John Cusack), High Fidelity

Previous generations had penicillin, the atom bomb, constitutional democracy... our contribution to human civilization will be a generation as obnoxious and self-involved as Will and Grace, as puerile and delusional as The Notebook, and as habitually mopey as Dashboard Confessional.

In other news, I just learned that the Wikipedia article for "Nice Guy" links directly to the article on "Involuntary Celibacy". And I just quit my job, and school doesn't start for another week. So there's been a lot of free time lately. See above.

--Kevin