I sat down this week with the intent of banging out another silly, slightly humorous article that dealt with a small part of our collective pop culture memories for your enjoyment. However, the moment I sat down and began writing, that article never materialized. As soon as I began typing, I wrote the following [three and a half essays] instead…

Seventy-two hours ago I became a square. I turned twenty-seven on the twenty-seventh and, as I have the preceding three years, I sat down to assess my life.

I am twenty-seven and I live with my parents in the same house I grew up in as a child. My computer, where I spend most of my time typing articles/stories and staring at web pages, is in my old bedroom. I sit in a chair two feet from where my bed stood.

I live here and I am twenty-seven.

I am twenty-seven. I have three college degrees but I have no job. I have not had a job in well over a year. Not since I had a disagreement with an employer over money – I wanted to be paid for the work I did and he didn’t like that idea. I would like to work though. The novelty of playing video games all day wore off a few months ago. But the job market in my area is right now terrible for people with my qualifications and just as bad for part-time work. Numerous people in the last two months, both family and not-family, have suggested I leave the area. I’d like to leave and find a new place, preferably somewhere south of here (I hear there are good jobs in the Carolinas), but I’m not sure that makes a difference because at this point, I can’t even afford the tape to close up a cardboard moving box.

I’m twenty-seven and I am officially poor.

I am twenty-seven and I have no assets. No stocks, no bonds, no savings, no liquid cash…nothing. If I were to die tomorrow, my family would receive less than five-hundred dollars from the life insurance policy I’ve had since I was a child and an additional amount (of nearly the same value) to bury me with. That’s not even close to helping take care of one semester’s worth of my student loans. I’m twenty-seven and I’m so poor that I can’t even afford to die.

I tell you all of this not because I’m looking for a handout or some pity. I’m not looking for anyone to read this and say ‘Hey Scott, I hear you’re in tough times. Have ten dollars – go get yourself a cup of coffee and a nice sandwich’ or ‘Hey Scott, send me your resume. I work for a company in New York City and I may be able to help you land something, even part-time’. Though I wouldn’t mind if such a thing as the latter happened, I tell you all of this without having an ulterior motive in me. I’m not telling you all of this because I want some sympathy nor to start a fight either. I know there are many people out there in the great American vista who are just as bad off as me or worse. I am telling you all of these things as simple facts – facts so that you may understand what state of mind I am in as I write this. My back is against the wall…and I am twenty-seven…

“I am twenty-seven.”

When I say them aloud, the words sound different each morning. Some mornings they hit me like chunks of broken porcelain. Other mornings they make me laugh (“Only seven more years and I’ll have lived longer than Jesus did when he was here! Haw haw haw!”). And other mornings they make me roll over to stare at the wall without my glasses on, thinking that perhaps I am a personified example of what is wrong with America itself:

- I am apathetic. All in all, I don’t care about the war in Iraq. Yes, it sucks that people are dying needlessly and there seems to be no end to the conflict, but I’m not going out to join a picket line against it anytime soon…I don’t care about ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’. I may not have a job but I think that spending your entire day playing nothing but an endless stream of video games is more important that watching people argue over “Should we force people to say ‘Merry Christmas’?”…I don’t care about abortion [rights] and I don’t give a God damn about what two celebrities broke up with each other last Saturday night! Fuck you Mary Hart, you high-paid-for-your-visibility vulture! Richard Pryor’s body wasn’t even cold in the hospital before we saw you with his caretaker/wife in the front parlor of his house, asking: “What was the last thing he said to you before he passed on?”

- I’m angry at things and I go on tangents about them. Things I don’t understand, both abstract and concrete. Things like why people obsess themselves with celebrity gossip, why “reality TV” is still popular or the 1040 income tax forms.

- I’m easily frustrated when things aren’t plain and easy to figure out. Like the 1040 income tax forms.

- I’m pessimistic. I don’t think things on the grand stage are going to get better any time in the near future. I mentioned the war in Iraq above. Yes, I think it’s terrible that young men and women are being killed (on both sides) in the prime of life. I think that life is the most precious commodity we can own but I’m not about to join up with a group and march on Washington, DC demanding peace. In the history of man, I can’t think of one political protest that stopped a large armed conflict. Except for maybe India’s uprising against the British Empire, but I don’t know if that counts or not. I don’t recall it being two armies marching on each other.

- I’m ignorant and sometimes stubborn in my ideals.

- I’m ambitionless. I don’t know if there are any goals left for a person to really shoot for – goals like the classic image of the “American Dream”. When asked to write down a list of the goals I had for my life, I listed simple things like “drive a minivan” and “try a meal of cooked venison”

- I’m cynical because of what I see around me…and because I feel somewhat betrayed…

I am twenty-seven and I’m coming to terms with what my age means in terms of social labeling. Grudgingly I’m coming to accept that I’m on the tail end of what became known as “Generation X”. I’m not old enough to really be classified as “X” and I’m not young enough to be called “Y”. So, for the sake of argument here, I’m going to round up and call myself a part of “X”.

(As a side note: I’m against that label since I don’t feel a generation can be defined, let alone named, until the previous one is totally in the grave. But I’m in no position to argue with a term that has become so ingrained in our culture.)

“Generation X”: The generation that lived and thrived on the promise that “the slacker shall inherit the Earth”. We were the ones who gave the world an apathetic, cynical shine. We gave the world movies like Clerks and Slacker. We were the ones who didn’t wash our clothes every day or comb our hair when we went out. We took loitering at the mall to a whole new level. Instead of walking around in neon colors and shopping, we sat in the food court debating the possible recruiting tactics of The Galactic Empire and made bets on if “The Simpsons” would last beyond seven seasons.

We had abandoned everything that had come before us – Beatniks, “Flower Power”, Disco bunnies, Yuppies – everything except for campy television shows we watched back when “Apple Jacks” were only one color. The staunch defiance of Joan Baez, the fun-loving vibes of KC & The Sunshine Band, the optimism of U2, and the poetic questioning of Bruce Springsteen were all put aside. We looked to Trent Reznor, Chris Cornell and Kurt Cobain to define for us the concept of “nihilism”. But Trent and Chris couldn’t do it and Kurt didn’t have the guts to get the words out…

Kurt’s been dead for ten years now and the legions that looked to him have died with him. Well, almost all of them. It’s as though some of them took a nap a few years ago and woke up to find that the others had moved on. The slackers did not inherit the Earth, as was promised. They’d gone out and gotten white-collar jobs. They invested in Internet sites and start-up companies. When the silicon bubble burst they didn’t freak out. They didn’t need to. They’d bought real estate, settled down, and packed their flannel shirts away in their closets, to break them out in the fall when they went out apple picking with their spouse and infant children.

Maybe I’m coming down too hard on them. That portion of the generation only did what they had to do. They didn’t know any more than anyone else that the world was shifting again. And not all of “Generation X” moved on to own a nice house with a Toyota Camry in the driveway. Just a significant number did. They moved on and didn’t tell anyone about it – especially not the ones they left behind, and that’s why I feel betrayed. I am one of those left behind.

Perhaps you think I’m being overly dramatic in saying that so let me give you an example of what I’m talking about: In my undergrad college days, one of my best friends was the epitome of the “slacker”. He woke up at two or three in the afternoon, went to classes if he felt like it, hung out in the night playing “Dungeons and Dragons” or sat in a coffee shop with a girl, sketching her in his notebooks. Hell, he even called himself a “slacker” – wearing it like a badge of validation on his shirt sleeve.

Now he’s an art professor at a well-regarded university.

As for me…I am twenty-seven and I wake up at eight in the morning to spend the rest of my day listening to old records to try and ignore the nagging, doubting voice in my head that tells me I have no job prospects – no relief, no exit from the world I’m in. Not even the “no exit” that was banned from so many bookstores.

I am twenty-seven and I feel just like Andy French in that episode (episodes?) of the cartoon “Mission Hill”: I went to sleep and woke up to find my entire peer group had gone out and gotten high-paying computer jobs…while I sit, watching “The Price is Right” each day, wondering what would be the first thing I’d have done to my mouth if I had dental insurance…

Turning twenty-seven isn’t all that bad. There is an upshot to it, even if I can’t afford the royalties if I sang “Happy Birthday” to myself. On Tuesday, I woke up, drank my morning coffee and took a hot shower. When I got out, I sat on my bed, half naked and wet. I reached out, flipped on my stereo and skipped around on a CD until I found the right track. The crunching guitar riff of Rainbow’s “Since you’ve been gone” ignited the air around me. I listened for a minute and then pressed “PAUSE”. I turned the volume up to “9”, rewound the track to the start and sat ten feet away, blasting it.

And then I smiled. The “Generation X” t-shirt that my peers wore, the one that read “If it’s too loud, you’re too old” does not apply to me yet.

I am twenty-seven…but I’m not “too old”.

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