Hurry up please it's time.\nThe end is coming.\nFlash floods\nDisasters in the sun\n Dogs unleashed\n Sister in the street\n her brassiere backwards.
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti "Junkman's Obbligato" (1958)
Ferlinghetti sung his ode to the burned-out businessmen, those who left their neckties on the lampposts and became Troggs of the night. And so goes the worries of the world, buildings blown up by Arabs in Arab land, it sounds like Los Angeles to me. Why should anyone care when it's not happening to them? Oh yeah, didn't it?\nI worry about my friend Rob and his quest for inspiration with a degree in finance. My mother is always telling me that no one likes work. That's some sort of variant on the Protestant Ethic, in which you work hard, live sparingly and don't complain, die and ascend to heaven. I suppose that this is a reasonable goal, but Benjamin Franklin once said, "Those who would sacrifice a little freedom for temporal safety deserve neither."\nI'm far from the only one to feel these things. Desiring freedom, expecting pleasure and having no real idea of how to obtain any of it. The 18-25 year old male is in an extremely undesirable state of mind these days, he's existentialist, sarcastic, smart for sure, lazy and most likely nostalgic for the 19th Century and Oscar Wilde. Possibly he wears black framed glasses, listens to what he calls "indie-rock" and dresses sharp (if only a little shaggy). In private, he's gentle and loving, probably depressed, but not really. Basically, he is confused.\nRaymond Carver wrote about him (autobiographically) back in the '60s, but this type of hipster is proliferating in mean ways these days. It's strictly a middle class beast too. Those with mathematical brains and blue-collar pasts and futures in sight somehow understand the unified theory of everything and the need to make money.\nI'm 23 since last week, I've got my parents' credit card and money rolling in for the rent and groceries. I started a job last week and I think I'm slowly quitting it. I feel love, but it's comfortable as opposed to passionate. Rather it is a continuance, an entry to give me purpose for a few moments longer, as arbitrary as everything else. My bretheren and I, even if we despise each other on the way, merely need someone to care (the stupid ones ask for everybody shamelessly), and so we ask for it precociously and preciously.\nShe calls this stuff "sad bastard" musings, and there is certainly a lot of self-imposed exile and shame involved in this generation. The feelings are undeniable though, it's a lack of direction towards anything. That direction, I believe, is towards anything typical, not a lack of direction towards something meaningful. \nWe are those who realize the end of the world is not coming, we suppose it'll get worse, but that's probably not true either. Most likely it will keep on keeping on until the sun gets too big and hot for us to live under. The only success we've found in the search for peace of mind is to have a small corner of the room to complain in and a captive audience. Unfortunately, a standard solution to an increasingly conventional problem.\nFerlinghetti ended that poem by writing:
I must arise and go now\nto the Isle of Manisfree\nway up behind the broken words\nand woods of Arcady.
Those Beats were middle class too, but they're all dead now, the crazy bastards.
