hush me up please

we can’t be the “new beat” generation. there are no trolleys on woodward, none of my friends would jump into a moving boxcar, not a cafeteria with terrible coffee in sight. we have jobs, cars, nice families that love us even if they don’t understand us. we’re not beat. we didn’t win the war or drop the bomb, we get abused by interest rates and shoddy foreign policy. but there is the same pulse

same sense of dis-ease. a fear of the evangelical furvor, the knowledge that everyone is drugged on something, over the counter cough syrup or red bull is our benzedrine, there are parallels, in our writing too, stream of consciousness, un-touched-up pictures of people making faces at themselves in the mirror. but we aren’t beat, there needs to be a different word. the second wave of beats were damned, billy burroughs jr. knew he was “cursed from birth.” there must be some adjective-noun-verb that sums it all up, in one or two syllables and i am still searching for it, maybe in vain.

branding something as a movement seems egomaniacal, but i don’t think this is. we are the grounds at the bottomn of the coffee cup and we are restless. i am ashamed to only speak one language but probably won’t learn more, our entitlements embarrass us, our classmates make us duck our heads and read poetry right through a lecture on global warming, we still probably absorb more.

there is no sense in emulating, i can’t grow a good beard anyways, i’ll never find comfort in fucking adolescent boys, i don’t want to be allen ginsberg when i grow up, and i’m pretty sure dan crowley can’t ever drink enough or put on enough weight to be jack kerouac, it is foolish to try. but we care enough, and might be humble enough that what we have to say carries importance. i think all writing is important, but people who think they are bad writers tend to be the best, and i have though myself absolutely shitty for about five years.

juji says things like “i think in fifty years people will wonder if we were lovers,” and i think it is silly and selfish to want to be famous, but maybe she has a point. it is hard to want to be sucessful and not feel like a complete fucking jackass, but i want people to read my stuff. maybe for my sake. maybe for their sake. mostly so they will start writing too, or atleast drawing, or maybe singing, but turn off the radio at least.

i don’t have anything to say for myself, but i do have stories, and i plan to keep on writing them down, and hope people will atleast try to follow the narrative thread, which leads nowhere but more poems. i only have poems, and a little bit of government subsidized debt, and a really amazing group of family and friends.

we might be the hush generation, that could work, that might work, i am not so sure.

i need to stop thinking and start writing, so i guess that is what i will do.