Everyone’s Pissed, And If They Aren’t Now, They Should Be After This

Everyone’s Pissed, And If They Aren’t Now, They Should Be After This

by Palmer Hennessey Cole

We are a generation stumbling lost, walking through sleep, seeking

the American Dream our grandparents built from Detroit Steel

and mass produced on countless assembly lines, before our parents

inherited it and drove away to college, after which they somehow lost

the keys along the way between nuclear families needing booze

to speak with each other, and one pill to sleep and yet another to fuck

the disinterested drunk in bed next to them under the nine hundred

thread count Egyptian cotton duvet, marked Made In Mexico, purchased

from a Korean distributer with a PayPal account through eBay.

I’ll tell you a secret, that most of us weren’t invited to the party. Unless

you’re one of the few gifted with looks, wealth, or greedy intellect, you

probably didn’t even know that this invitation-only-orgy is going down now

with flesh by the pound served on gilded gold plates with sharp knives

for the Catholics who like their meat extra rare. With blood diamonds

on the liquor fountains, ivory mounted to the free money machines

and all the beauty you can rape, guaranteed STD free with a complimentary

fistful of Pfizer pharmaceuticals that keep you “going” on many levels.

Of course what do I know?

I’m just a kid from the same college that institutionalized everyone else

in my generation of the walking sleep, who’s familiar with the notion of dreaming

yet has never actually had a real or original one, but suspect they know all about it

because they played it once on their Xbox. Everybody knows that experiencing something and reading about it are the same thing. Just ask the Iraqi War veteran with a Call Of Duty addiction; or the rich red-state rancher who absolutely knows, for a fact, that welfare is worthless; or even the ultra-left liberal lobbyist who bought

enough union votes to keep minimum wage low enough to keep buying his favorite

L.A.-Based, Sweatshop-Free, Partially-Recycled sneakers.

I know it’s what our grandparents built, and our parents drove home from school

and now stir their drinks over. I know I’m just an idiot with a pen and another plan, dreaming up something bad to make today seem better. I know it’s what is conjured each night in our throats as we force our eyes shut and try as hard as humanly possible to imagine a place other than here,

I know,

even if it’s a nightmare.