because internet

We're introduced to Jack, our protagonist, as he's daydreaming and immediately they tell us the girl next door (Clara Bow) is a pain in his ass. (Clara Bow. Who is Clara Bow. And even looks better in uniform.) Then we meet Sylvia who is the city girl everyone wants and the rich guy she's in love with. Jack just can't read a room. Sylvia kinda feels bad for him and suffers through his BS.

Then we go to the room we enlist in and center is a bunch of ass in the exam room and this pen scene.

They go into the army, start boxing and it turns from Rivals to Friends complete with boob grab and wiping blood off your chin with my glove.

So I had to try this and

Symphony in Black

Erté

The reason current teenagers and people in their really early 20s are conservative on accident and have such shitty takes on the internet is because our generation was much more sheltered than previous generations and because we were raised to be ok with orwellian servailence and that is 100% the fault of our parents, Reagan Era kidnapping panics, and the rise of technology all coming together to prevent us from doing the sketchy shit that sends parents into panic mode but which is also completely fundemental to childhood development. If your parents had even a crumb of money to their name and even a shred of free time they started tracking your phone as soon as it was possible to. I did not experience this because my parents are actively trying to live like it's the 1990s and still have not gotten cell phones of their own, and did not let me have one until I was 18 years old and it was no longer their choice, but literally over half of my friends in middle and high school had their phones tracked by their parents at some point or other, and we would occasionally find this out, not because their parents told them, but when we were trying to do the aforementioned sketchy shit and their parent's car would pull up. And I would, like a reasonable person after finding this out, encourage my friends to just leave their phones at home, and their response would be "What if I get kidnapped" or "My parents are just trying to keep me safe"

This in my estimation has lead to a combination of kids being terminally online because they do have internet access and are better at deleting search history than their parents think they are, but don't have the freedom to go out and do shit without their parents' knowledge or consent, so they have the most privacy from the people who control their lives while they're on the internet, and kids not having the real world experiences they should have, not knowing how to connect with other people irl, not feeling comfortable leaving the house because of the horror story lies their parents told them to make them ok with the surveillance they were inflicting on their kids. Kids these days are growing up in the fucking panopticon when they should be out in the woods playing with knives or stealing cigarettes from their older sibling and going out to an empty parking lot to smoke them or whatever and that shit is sticking with them into adulthood. Things that were "tee hee we could get in trouble isn't this so fun and daring" in the 1990s and 2000s have become in the 2010s and 2020s things that are "If I do that without texting my parents some sort of lie to excuse where my location is my parent's car will pull up and I will get grounded for the next two weeks."

Nobody my age is voting republican. Let's be clear on that. With the exception of a small minority of gamer gaters and people who were raised in actual cults most people my age are either commies or good liberals who votes straight blue down the ticket. This is because of the greta thunberg effect. We're all afraid of dying of thirst because there's no water anymore at the age of 35. Wealthy white children are no longer safe with the republican party which has become less of a political party and more of a death cult, and white children are less wealthy than they used to be (I specify white because POC by in large never voted for the party of the southern strategy for obvious reasons). We as a generation are so insanely blue that they're trying to raise the voting age to 25 about it.

This liberalism and party affiliation doesn't preclude them from being conservative on accident. What I mean by that is... Well

No kink at pride is a great example. The assumption that pride should exist at all makes them think that they're immune to conservative logic but they're still trying to enforce a dominant ideology onto a minority group. That person who made the tweet about how you shouldn't have sex in houses where there are children in the other room and if you can't avoid it you're a sex addict. That's a great example of like straight up puritanism coming out of the mouth of someone who proports themselves to be a leftist

If you ever see a discourse that feels like an obvious psyop as an adult and you can't understand why these supposed leftist youths are falling for it it's because that kid has never had sex in the woods and had to try to buy plan b under their parent's nose. My generation is dumb about sex. We're dumb about drugs. We're dumb about theft. We moralize literally everything. We're so dumb about stranger danger that we never learned how to community organize so while the vast vast majority of us are crushed by existential dread about debt and climate change but we never do anything about it because we just don't know how to organize because we're raised to see everyone else as a threat and we never went to or organized parties as teens because our parents would always know and stop us.

Film studios:

Me: Hey can I have some subtitles?

Film studios:

Me: Hey can I have some actual sound?

Film studios:

— He even called himself “the homeless king”.

From Cynthia Zarin’s fifth collection, Orbit, a poem about the things we carry.

Flowers

This morning I was walking upstairs from the kitchen, carrying your beautiful flowers, the flowers you brought me last night, calla lilies and something else, I am not sure what to call them, white flowers, of course you had no way of knowing it has been years since I bought white flowers—but now you have and here they are again. I was carrying your flowers and a coffee cup and a soft yellow handbag and a book of poems by a Chinese poet, in which I had just read the words “come or go but don’t just stand there in the doorway,” as usual I was carrying too many things, you would have laughed if you saw me. It seemed especially important not to spill the coffee as I usually do, as I turned up the stairs, inside the whorl of the house as if I were walking up inside the lilies. I do not know how to hold all the beauty and sorrow of my life.

More on this book and author:

Learn more about Orbit and browse other books by Cynthia Zarin.

Listen to a musical setting of “Flowers” composed by Eric Schorr and sung by Susan Botti.

Hear Zarin discuss her most recent book, Two Cities (David Zwirner Books, 2020), with Michael Cunningham (via McNally Jackson Books) and with Lucas Zwirner (on the David Zwirner Podcast).

Share this poem and peruse other poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

Voter deadlines for the general election, which is on November 3, are quickly approaching and vary based on state.

You can register to vote in 5 minutes or less at https://turbovote.org/