A Certain Faction (a greatly extended metap
01/23/2002 11:51 p.m.

The moon calls us out to freeze in its cold stare...our thoughts thawing again in that certain hour of evening where the shadow of a valley leaves just the canvass of trees around tipped tangerine. We are those few who know we'll never touch true happiness if only owed to the fact that we know too much of happiness to believe in it. Those of us who, in a world where knowledge has become a liability and innocence a weakness, still cling to old noble ideas (or perhaps the ideas of old nobility) are reluctantly romantic (or romantically reluctant at any rate). We are united, but not a force. We are superbly lonely amidst our own company, reach out to the masses with our most earnest, but are touched little by the face of modernity. We find much in which to believe today, but a poverty of ideals substantial enough on which to base our beliefs. We place our trust in the memory of strangers like our sneakers deposit scuff marks on gym floors, leaving just a bit of ourselves to be rubbed over and swept away by uncounted other tread falls upon the same ground, only rarely marking deep enough to make any lasting impression. As it was said by Louis Kronenberger that "the trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned into prose, but that it has turned into advertising copy", so we wage great campaigns through verse in the art of marketing ourselves if only to ourselves. Where penmanship and correspondence once reigned, we pride ourselves on words per minute and ever scrolling 'buddy lists'. We get a lot of Dennis Miller's esoteric banter. We know heads of state (not personally, but to be able to name them in relation to their position somehow sets us high and above the majority). There is always talk of travel someday to old countries whose languages we'll never speak but always say we'll learn. We sometimes grow nostalgic of the campfires of youth, after which we construct smores in microwave ovens, by some means always having the appropriate ingredients on hand. We insist that those of high school were indeed not the best days of our lives, though agree that it’s doubtful our days now are at all better. We oscillate between brilliance and disgust at our inadequacy. Vague goals of improved vocabulary and an endless reading list remain in the musty corners of our minds. We know our time to be inconsequential to the arc of human history, but we still consider ourselves crucial to the saga. We are alternatingly anemic and obese in our conversational appetites, sometimes starving for days for the sound of our own voices raised in agreement or testimonial. We are not weak alone, nor strong as a whole. Fatalism and existentialism along with a thousand other quasi religions war amongst themselves in our forebrains; though we've managed to piece together enough of a quilt of ideologies to smother the pale flickering flames of hopelessness, confuse lust, and to tame our inherent guilt into a manageable workhorse. We are not the tide on which trends swell into the popular conscious. To see us you'd think fashion as yet holds no sway over society. We do not condemn nor condone any of which our peers indulge; yet we make no practice of withholding judgment on our contemporaries. Much to our dismay, we can never keep a houseplant alive. We are never as educated or as well read as we'd like to be, nor are we as spontaneous or clever. We do not fail in our own eyes, but our successes never quite match the measure of our disappointments. We are not lost, but have yet to find ourselves in relation to our purpose. We haven't the brilliance of those we've read and admired, but account for this in passion and complexity. Name-dropping highbrows, the harassed Ivy League hopefuls we are not. We swear, but are not disposed to much else in the way of vices. Forsaking all else, we question; though this trait does not denote we have not our own answers. Each finds his own dilemma, his individual bliss, his particular brand of drama, his own strangling albatross to nurse; and, likewise, manages a tenuous grasp on happiness unique to himself, and a proximity to love. No sacred brotherhood are we. One passing another on the street would scarcely spark recognition or suspicion. We are merely a loose alliance, a kindred spirit that pervades. We are dreamers, but not by the classic definition. Our very constitution suggests a constant merging, reformation, defection, and cessation. We're all we can't help from being, slave to our noble intentions, victims of convention. And so we are, the American future.

I am currently Bothered
I am listening to the hum of multiple computers