We live in the shadow of the generations that have come before us, and stood so much taller than we

ever knew how to, because we could never be heirs to the pride that came before us — we never knew:

we never knew what it was to struggle, and therefore, could never hope to win against any odds:

we always had had enough, and so were never satisfied, and when we got more and more and more, if we could,

we stripped off the skin and threw away the meat, whether we could afford to or not, sometimes

even to spit out the tastiest tidbits, out of a contempt for some unnamable thing, perhaps

what we desired most of all, and never figured out that we could have had it, so easily, and never tried to.

Media saturation, deluged by so much information that we don’t know where we stand anymore:

we are the children of this age, a childhood strangely extended, and sharply shortened, apocalypses

that come and go with the TV seasons: catered to for as long as we have electronic shopping carts to personalize,

crowds of us that speak in acronymic grunts, wondering if the word “perversion” ever had meaning

(or if it was an old media creation, too, like “love”): dreaming in pixels, so digitized our eyes, not

ever having seen a photograph that was not retouched, watching reality on TV, not wondering

why In Real Life, that which is not recorded never happened, and fiction is more effective than experience.