“They don’t make ’em like they used to”: we haven’t ever known first hand what this statement meant,

for in our past, there was no golden, Edenic solidity where the idylls of youth were ever truly free from care,

no point where there wasn’t something wrong, really wrong with the world, and we were not aware of it;

how we were convinced back from our youth that the earth was dying, or at least, continuously sick —

wondering, we, how the generations before left such a morbid ruin to us, not ever thinking how we would

make the excuse that they did, how it was like that when we got here — when we slowly began to realize

how arrogant we imagined, that we would watch the end of the world happen, and stay unchanged.