I wrote a big long essay full of pretty language about heartbreak and the deliberate smashing of dreams. I liked it and was going to turn it into a post here.
Then I dropped my phone. Buttons were hit. Words lost… Meh. Typical Gen X ball dropping.
It was overly self-important, totally melodramatic and way too political anyway.
Typical Gen X ball dropping. Weren’t we supposed to be saving the world or something?
Right?
What if that old stinky ball should have been dropped?
What if an actual future was made possible by a bunch of fuck-ups?
I had this whole thing written about my generation.
How we were raised to face the end of the world. What we did.
How we managed to hold it at bay for a bit, to pass the burden on to our kids, (sorry/not sorry).
Some of us, myself included, toyed with the idiotic notion that the old world could be saved
Some of us are throwing fits cause it won’t be.
MAGA: the death throws of a dream. I appreciate the sentiment. I really do.
(Because the dream was hammered into my head too – with the shocking, awful power of a thousand nuclear bombs being launched at our exact locations and blowing a mutually destructive hole in our consciences.
(Yes, bring back shopping malls, jello molds and the constant existential fear of mutually assured destruction. Thank you, no.)
Anyway, where was I?
Right. some people among my generation, the smart ones, tried something much more revolutionary: they said ‘fuck that dead world’ and began building the foundations of the next world.
Have you thanked an older geek lately? Yeah. Those weird dudes that don’t ever seem to act their age.
They’re the dudes who tied up the their sister’s phone lines all night because they were scheming about MUD or something on message boards while us cool rejects (me anyway) were scheming about how to talk to girls.
It’s the geeks you can thank that any of us have a prayer of witnessing something truly miraculous; not A new world, but the awakening of an entirely new dimension.
I was always friends with the Geeks, but I was just a freak. I suck at the detailed nitty gritty stuff. But I watched and thought, and watched and thought some more. Then I ran and hid for about ten years, cause saw what was coming and wanted nothing to do with any of it. I still don’t really.
But a call is a call and if you don’t answer you pay a heavy price. And this is the area I understand. I was never the best constructor build-it dude, nor was I the kid that was going to smash everything and let it all go to hell.
I’m the between guy. I’m the Liminality. A lot of us Xers are. I’ve got all this random stuff. Mostly bits and pieces of bygone days of yore, probably useless, but who knows.
And the whole world, our little corner of the Cosmos gets to know what Liminality means now. Because we are betwixt and between, ghosts of the old world dancing as the veil to the new one begins to thin.
I’d really like it if you would take this journey with our sense of humor. Dry sarcasm and keen eye for irony are timeless (or they should be), in the old world and the new.
Oh! Wait. Before you kids run off….
Somewhere around here I have these seeds. They arrived mysteriously by mail and they weren’t labeled, but … LoL … See what they grow.
You’re welcome to any of this other stuff, our empire of dirt.
We’re happy to give that old luggage a home.
But please, do me one favor; I hope it’s not too much:
I’d like a room with a view of that beanstalk we’ve sown.
DISCLAIMER: Generation X takes neither responsibility, nor credit for any new dimension shenanigans you kids self-actualize
Come watch the seeds sprouting from the Dataplex Ouroboros
The Cosmic Liminality 