Stop being so fucking beat, he'd said to me. It didn't make sense at the time. I was a long call from Kerouac and his weird little existentialist Buddha-cult. I could understand Zen and all, don't get me wrong, but the knee-to-knee pseudopsychic conversating took it a bit to far for my tastes. Sitting on my friend's couch at four AM, a hundred miles from home, brain still afloat on residual contraband... it helped me put his commentary in perspective.

Maybe beat was right. I sit adjacent to the girl from Washington, the girl from six years ago, wracked with a peculiar sensation of passive phantom guilt. A guilt I have no right or reason to be feeling, but then, the subconscious, mysterious flashes are always the strongest. To Hell with it, I think, not having any real idea what I'm referring to.

I take another swig of water from my green tea jug depressingly devoid of green tea. Tap water. Not even purified tap water. It wouldn't have been hard to flip the purifier, but you know what? Fuck it. I don't get enough various metal oxides in my system as it is. The cigarettes help.

A wifebeater and oversized white karate pants. A candle flickering, an air conditioner blasting into the back of my hair, knocking it wild, hell, wilder. What a fucking trip today was.

I'd told that son of a bitch that if he didn't meet me at his old digs, I'd get lost. I had no experience navigating his city, and for some inexplicable and nefarious reason, every street in his county changed it's name after two blocks. Mapquest was less than accommodating.

“Well, man,” he said, “It'd probably be easier for you to just come here. It's right off the highway.”

Halfway up, my green tea, whom I love and care for as a child, felt te need to utterly betray my trust and drench the map in condensation. The result? The beginning line was fine, as was the entire duration of the highway; just when it got intricate, just when the directions started twisting and turning and zig-zagging, it melted into a vague blue swatch encompassing four counties. I am certain I followed those directions exactly, as I got so heinously lost I drove every road IN those four counties at least twice. A kindly hippie man, his child on a Spider-Man powerwheels bike, was kind enough to give me more specific directions to the house.

After a brief lockout stint, everyone's arrival, and a fair deal or marijuana, I find myself awake in the wee hours of the morning to a silent and dead apartment, typing by candlelight like the more legitimate writerfolk of yore, stealing the occasional glance at the girl, the fire, the shadows, and mentally sinking entirely too deep for comfort.

Life is distracting, to say the least. Submission to the grind leads to losing that flair, that certain zest that makes actually waking up in the morning (or evening, in my case) worth a shit. I'd lost my grip on that. For a long time, it was a balancing act. The job was always the priority. Make money to spend money, make more money, spend more money, nothing ventured, nothing gained, the wheels madly spinning, dirt thrown everywhere. My friends, the melodramatic, tempestuous emotional clusterbombs they are, they came in a close second. Everyone needed the attention. Everyone needed the rock to lean on, the shoulder to cry on. And damned if he wasn't always there. Then was the girl. Cue phantom guilt. Family after that, and oh, wasn't that one always fun. The father who won't speak to me since he emasculated himself trying to kick me out of the house. My Ma convinced I'm on heroin, worried about the mood swings and how, oh, he's always so miserable. The little sibling, consistently leaving the house in a state of fucking grotesque, unsanitary turmoil. And then college.

College, the looming skeleton bastard reaching back at me from the future, all teeth and claws and crackling joints, the empty eye sockets staring at me, into me, through me, its bone the hue of paling aspiration. I'd dodged that bullet for long enough, and I'd ave to face the music eventually. Under the surface, I think I knew that college was the end of the line. The collapse of the goofy writer fantasy. I'd play it off when asked:

“Yeah, I'm going for Humanities. It's pretty great, it's a bunch of literary bullshit that can't possibly get me anywhere.”

It sounds flippant, but I said it because I knew and believed it. And I understand once I get there, once I commit to that, the dream is going to collapse. 120 new novels get published every year. Of the millions of books published annually, a pittance is fiction, and only 120 new writers can publish their first novel. Their masterpiece. The book they spent their life writing.

One hundred and twenty.

Imagine the waves of disappointment shipped out from those publishing houses, the spiritually broken, impoverished agents and the shattered novelists who's work just wasn't good enough to make the cut. Who didn't make top 120. Good God.

The uncertainty of the future doesn't scare me. It's comforting, knowing that anything can happen, and anything probably will. We are the final brood of humanity. We are Generation Omega. Anyone with the vaguest cognitive ability can see that the earth as we know it is spiraling down a sinkhole, and within the next fifty years, every single one of us, man, woman and child, will be reduced back to ephemeral cosmic aether.

This removes the boundaries and the caps. We are Babylon. Anything goes. You can have sex beamed directly into your house from space-satellites at any time of day or night. The most intimate of possible moments, the closest experience two human beings can share, brutalized and bastardized and deified and fetishized and shot all around the world via invisible rays, past this, past that, oh shit, did you see that? Backdoor Beauties 7 just got shot through Grandma's solar plexus! Truly, it is an age of marvels.

Violence is no longer a vice, but a virtue. It has been true for as long as humanity's had its death grip on the planet, but now it is less barbaric and person, more precise and sterile. Tactical strafe-bombings. Collateral damage. Seventeen-year-olds standing on windswept sand dunes, firing rifles taller than themselves at men they could never know from a culture they could never understand. It's much more precise now. Hell, look at modern execution. In the old days, the whole city would gather to watch the son of a bitch hang. The children would clap and cheer. Hooray for old-fashioned mob justice. Now we have a twenty-year queue, a cotton swab and a chemical cocktail that makes you sleepy enough to never wake up. Violence is still violence, just lighter. A shinier, happier kind of violence, all the righteous indignation and twisted schaudenfreude adrenaline, none of the mess. What a beautiful concept.

This weighs on me sometimes. There are no boundaries. We live in an age where you can get away with literally anything if you attach the right word to it. Mindless slaughter of complete strangers? War. No, wait. A crusade! No, scratch that. Freedom. Freedom brought to the Middle East. Self-serving batshit obsession? Brazenly illogical action done in the name of another? Love, obviously. Love is the worst of the hurrah words, because it literally defines “romanticism”. What's been more romanticized than romance?

Maybe the Romans. Maybe not.

You can do anyting for love. Hell, Meatloaf did. If you can find a way to attach that incorporeal quicksilver sentiment to ANY action, you are instantly forgiven by everyone. You couldn't help it. There were forces stronger than you at work!

Aw, shit, I just threw up a little in the keyboard.

Everyone needs a security blanket. Everyone needs a Get Out Of Jail Free card. We make our own. Society accepts them. Majority rules. This is a democracy, after all, and who doesn't want more freedom?

That's why our phones are tapped, by the way. To protect our freedom. Think about that next time you and your girlfriend are disposing of excess rollover minutes a little raunchily. Somewhere that's a man with a dark suit, dark glasses and a peculiar earpiece listening to everything either of you gasp and mutter and most probably floggin' his weasel under the desk. G-Men got needs too.

And in this world of Orwellian cliches, Generation Omega is essentially the game Perfection. We know the end is coming. We hear the timer buzzing down to zero, and not quietly. The timer is loud and obnoxious. The timer wants us to fucking know. And we do . We know what's going top appen when it all goes pop. Still, we pay our four bucks a gallon, drive to work or school, and keep trying to wriggle our way into our respective niches before the board springs up and everything goes to Hell.

This is what the fire made me realize last night. It's been set in stone tonight, as I sit here tapping quietly and listening to the white-noise air conditioner burbling behind my head, and the girl from Washington, quietly snoring. One moment at a time. Stop worrying about the future. Fuck, stop planning so much for the future. It's indefinite. The future is the electron, man; even if you could see it, it'd be gone by the time you did. And the past is a dream. All we've got proof of is what's in front of us, and that should be all that we need to worry about now, not what happened, not what will, just you and me and here and now and this weed and that pizza and those instruments and walking and smoking and talking and laughing and all the silly, irrelevant, divine bullshit that makes a life more than just a string of events.

Yeah, I said, nodding quietly to myself. Yeah, that sounds about right. I cleared my throat and smiled a little. Only a little. I save the bigger ones for when I need them. You know, in case of emergencies.

This has to get up tonight, I said, re-reading what I'd just written. Motherfucker better have a flash drive lyin' around.

Stop being so fucking beat. Hah. What a crazy cat. But I can dig it.

Yow.