I have been hard at work on The Next Great American Novel, as I’m sure all of you have been too. Good Luck.

I am struggling to plum the deep crags and fissures of My Generation’s twisted soul in order to sculpt the story that appropriately depicts Our Cause, whatever that is.

And even though the above sentence is the most hideous, overwritten sentence I’ve ever bothered not to fix, I’m a step Closer with this:

Airports are cruel catwalks These Days, showcasing too many boys in uniform hobbling through the terminals on crutches with their awkward, fragile families in tow. And these are the lucky ones. I didn’t need this. I’d be better off eating fudge, getting drunk, and watching Home Alone. But instead here I am, my heart breaking, my head throbbing and searching for comprehension. Reasons. Reason. Answers.

It didn’t help that I have been reading Kingdom of Fear by Hunter S. Thompson, that insane soothsayer of culture with an infamous penchant for the paranoid and negative who incessantly lambasted his world with the monikers of fear and loathing, swine, doom, and fear.

On page 165 of the paperback edition that has been so generously lent to me, Thompson dabbles with the perverse experience that is 9/11:

“Generals and military scholars will tell you that 8 or 10 years is actually not such a long time in the span of human history – which is no doubt true – but history also tells us that 10 years of martial law and a wartime economy are going to feel like a Lifetime to people who are in their twenties today. The poor bastards of what will forever be known as Generation Z are doomed to be the first generation of Americans who will grow up with a lower standard of living than their parents enjoyed.

“That is extremely heavy news, and it will take a while for it to sink. The 22 babies born in New York City while the World Trade Center burned will never know what they missed. The last half of the 20th Century will seem like a wild party for rich kids, compared to what’s coming now. The party’s over, folks.”

Ho Ho Ho. There you have it.

Merry Christmas.

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