Valedictorians of the Anti- A Love Letter from Gen Y to Gen Z
You’ve only just been grist in that mill I too was grist in.
Sitting right where I sat, I pass you a drink in the form of my vision of the old memory- The high school auditorium, among classmates unique to my year and place. Feeling cooly removed and above it all. Included, but asked nothing of. Unwilling to single myself out. Watching and listening, content to be healthy and exist.
Bodies rustling down the row in both directions, front and behind. You know them all and now you are In the middle. Always held fast to the middle…
Smiling while the guidance counselor pipes up on the stage… She admonishes you as a whole, as a student body, for not raising enough money to accommodate your particular class fund.
Nineteen hundred and ninety-eight. The year, not the cash.
Ok. Weren’t we just two years from the world ending anyhow?
It gave me a secret thrill to hear of our empty coffers. The artist in me already knew besides that failure was the only way out. Proudly Generation “Why?”
It’s why the best thinkers from any school will be the ones who get kicked out for going too dark: Nietzsche, Bataille, Camus.
Nihilism, Existentialism, Pessimism.
Worship to the extremism of nothingness.
Now you take my place. Do not fear. Know that you cannot fear. Launched from the womb right onto the giant’s shoulders- You are immortal. Brilliantly savage.
You may die by your own hands while understanding that suicide is for the weak.
No heights of reasoning brought us to this thinking, because it is not reasonable. It is barely knowledge. More so instinct.
I know you’re there… I’m sure you are. Drinking the ineffable music of your friend’s voices. Logging the character of their hope-driven divining smilies. Stay observant. Watchful.
I see it there - how deeply some of you care. You care a lot. And I thank you for that. For doing what I can’t.
To those of you like me, “Zed” in 2020- hearing that pockets are empty and lowest terms have been met; that everything is gone down to irreducible. The sentient exhausted conclusion that can only mean one thing… a thing suffering an exquisite amount of yin…
It means there is only an enormous perfect vacuum left open to our happiness. For whatever comes next.
We are only all together now, sitting patiently, wet behind the ears in our meditative state. Between and beholden to genealogy and to history…
The well is dry. Meanwhile, the elders drank it. Rich prick idiots are trying to talk you into believing that this is your problem. That you must talk the sky into raining to fill it all up again.
No. You need only discover how to eat the well. To find something that can nourish you better than the well ever could. Eliminating the need for the well in the first place endows you with the richness of sheer existence.
New adults, coming together by staying far apart, you don’t care about me, and you shouldn’t. Why should you?
But know this, because I’ve thought about you so much: You’re worth caring about.
I adopt your sincerest essences, regardless of how you feel, carrying bottomed-out self consciousness while you stumble clumsily over the world. Like a mother delights in her noisy, filthy wide-eyed meatsacks, her magnificent children.
I am invested in your accidents and your crushing defeats. Your mistakes and inaccuracies and foolish free pursuits beyond ownership and “value” and material gain. We are all there for you, though some remain still hidden…
Exist in choice, beauties. Gold and Shit are one and the same.