A Boomer's Futile but Earnest and Urgent
Apology to Postmodern Millennials
Through no fault of their own, post-moderns, Millennials especially, have no past, no present, and no future. The past is a lost 'back there back then,' an unreality without meaning or relevance. The future is 'some there some then' of mysteriously sheer futility. The present is the 'here now' they survive and endure only by past-posting it. Knowing no hereafter or thereafter, they only know a singularity of 'after' with no duration at all, as if some rogue ronin sliced all time away so quickly and cleanly they don't have to feel it as long as they can just stay in the standstill immediacy of that after-life hack.
Joe Black (Brad Pitt as the Grim Reaper in Meet Joe Black, 1998) is the inside-out upside-down tunnel-tag It-meister just met on the playground at the event horizon of now and then and here and gone. Under his lifted leg lie only nowhere, nowhen, noafter and every slope on every terrain slip-slides beneath it. There is only the inexorable after of the game until not. Oblivion lived forever -- not an oxymoron -- is the next singularity.
Postmodern Millennial life is neither bygone nor forthcoming or upcoming. In the grey shroud of after-fog unlight, mysty mundane masterpieces enthrall and enchant. Yet dead and buried beyond the semiotic dissonance of past-posted post-toasted after-thought, the same bargain-basement GloNation rotted-fruit still life crass-crafted onto cheap black velvet subliminally induces blase blind belief in the emperor's haute couture of naked angst, greed, hubris, and despair.
Joe Black's sting is the penultimate longest con possible; postmodern millennials are his easiest marks, passe-deceived by viral greed and desperation transparently costumed as twice-told truth and raw-boned reality. The truth and Truth are real and Reality then and there; but fast-past-frozen in the grim-lit after-fog, they aren't really there after all.
Finally, Boomers are the last gasp and the death rattle of modernity. Our inescapable spiral into Joe Black's long con set at his event-horizon playground was a war lost before the battle began. Our convoluted homogenized pasteurized God was kidnapped by post-Enlightenment beyond Belief positivism as we pissed away metaphysics and shat theology. We sold our souls and drowned our babies in liquid-modern superacid baths to rake in ransom with compound disinterest. Yet soulless, we lost our minds and spines, stole it all for ourselves. We decorate our dying with those faux masterpieces rather than paying you free with redeeming legacy. Stupid just can't be fixed, we rediscovered, so we blithely passed it on to our progeny. Then, like Pilate, we washed our hands of the blood of crucified Truth. Again.
Who could blame him if he just chose, this time, not to rise, again, from the after-death we always condemn him to? Who could blame him if, this time, he decided we just weren't worth the journey, troubles, trials, and tribulations of another Coming after he's gone all-in already?
Sorry can be the merest and meekest of signs. A Boomer's whimpering simpering death is the only audible apology and it's squandered already. A Millennial whine of forgiveness is pardon enough and grace sufficient.