And it’s all gone quiet in the city. The minions have genuflected. Democracy didn’t die in darkness; it was slowly tortured to death in broad daylight. While the world watched. Now this wasn’t a slow reckoning realization. It was what Gen Xers would call a V8 moment. (Which hearkens back to the gas belching V8 cars we first learned to drive.) Like when you read the news about the pederast priest. The creepy gymnast doctor. The piano teacher everyone loved. In plain sight.
The American way.
Someone cried out SUBVERT and the people all went cold. But each was turned inward, only looking out for number one. The whole scam was about making your own little worlds with wives and babies and trying to recreate what you didn’t have growing up. It all became so trite. Everyone knew something and could sell or tell you all about it. Self-promotion was the disease. So easy to fall into in a generation of Narcissists. What if that’s what you didn’t want. What if you still fulfilled that prophecy by recreating where you came from. The loop closes. The final chapters are starting to be written under the duress of mortality while the fall of Rome unfurls on the world stage The apes have been exposed. There’s no turning back. The divide is stark, the differences amplified. This was our Generation Reckoning; Gen X comes out OK in the long haul. We were the generation of everything from Izod preppies to headbangers decked out in spandex and blowdried feathered hair. We became mechanics. Teachers. Hair Stylists. Q Anon junkies. We became our parents. It was all so cyclical. Predictable. And then the plague. The social unrest. The paradigm shift of 2020, the year the Horsemen came waving the flags of plague, wrath, megalomania and greed.
Fettled towers of steel were our legacy. The shit heap. A five billion soul experiment sliding quickly down the drain.
This is how it ends.
This is how we lose.
But this is how I ended it though: Burned out years before retirement. The days when the years start to take their inevitable toll. Sacks of flesh over the eyes. Unrecognizable in the mirror. Self-aggrandizement at the midnight hour. Eating popcorn naked with the dog at your feet. Groping around the night-lit house with THC, Wellbutrin, Prozac and antiacids fogging up your muscles, sore rickety and achy. This is the middle life. When wisdom has set in. The stage of the path where it was truly GROW OR GO.
And me?
Grow or ….
I went. I jumped on the bullet train straight into the lathe. From the frying pan and into the threshing machine. The borderland, where freaks and clowns and misfits and dismal sunrises arched into a gunmetal sky in shadow jagged tendrils—castles, Tudor homes, peaked skyscrapers, the stuff of comic book landscapes: A sinister moonlit metropolis horizon starkly etched in black against white. Exudes a comforting aura of forlorn; a sense that there is, after all, a purpose. There’s a second consciousness–however torturous or uncomfortable that is. The redundant dichotomy. Themes in life. Dedication to the flesh made portals we destroy while trying to preserve. Up to this point, I’ve exercised extremes while seeking inner balance. Or at least peace. And this is what I found.
20 July 2021.
Difficult To Cure 
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