(My perspective is from living in the United States, the premier capitalist hellscape on Planet Earth):
1. Most people are really selfish.
2. Most people don’t care about others, including family, friends, and colleagues.
3. Most parents don’t actually love and care for their children as much as they feign over social media. When people say they’ll do anything for their children, that’s bullshit.
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| The pride of Castro Valley: Cliff Burton |
I have my regrets from this one life I will live; things I’ve done and said that I wish I could rewind and undo so they never happened. In this, the year of the Lord 2023, I feel like the biggest regret in my life is that I never really played in a band. Man, what a miss—and I feel like it’s too late at this point to aspire for, and playing in a band just isn’t the same thing it was in the Before Times (before, you know, that virus no one wants to talk about came into our lives).
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| Photo by alex yosifov |
Born in 1979, I am a proud member of the Xennials—or the Oregon Trail Generation—a micro-generation born between 1977 to 1983 that had “an analog childhood and digital young adulthood,” according to its Wikipedia entry. Since last year, I have periodically wondered what my son’s micro-generation will be dubbed. He was born less than three years before the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic started in late 2019. He and other children born before or just after 2015 fleetingly experienced life without a Biosafety Level 3 virus actively circulating throughout the planet; they briefly inhabited a planet before catastrophes and weather anomalies resulting from climate change became a regular occurrence.
Generation Doomed?
Generation Fucked?
Or, The Final Generation?
Yesterday my six-year-old son graduated from kindergarten during the Age of SARS-CoV-2. Oh, man, what a school year. I can’t believe we made it through unscathed and evaded the virus practically everyone pretends doesn’t exist or affect us anymore.
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| northern New Mexico, 2011 |
In June 2010, three months after a PET scan showed no cancerous activity in my body, The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico awarded me with my first artist residency. Then, on January 27, 2011, bulky luggage in hand, a guitar bag strapped around my shoulder, snowflakes fluttering through the night sky, I set foot in Taos for a six-week residency. I was living in San Francisco at the time, sharing a flat with three roommates. After ridding my body of Hodgkin lymphoma with over half a year of chemotherapy and radiation treatment, it was my first adventure away from the city where my body had manifested a blood cancer.
The Wurlitzer Foundation provided me with a home: Casita 9n on quiet Burch Street. The tiny adobe home was nestled beneath cottonwood trees. The casita’s backdoor opened to a snow-covered field. Every day, scores of crows and magpies squawked and flew about the trees that had sprouted from this land. Albeit fleeting, it was the first home of my own. I was thirty-one years old.
