Barry Lyga's Blog: The BLog, page 24

Unsoul’d is #1!

My quirky, sexy adult novel, Unsoul’d, has hit the top spot on Kobo’s list for Fiction & Literature (as well as the subcategories of Humor and Literary)!

Yes, I’m psyched!

Unsoul’d was an interesting project for me. Written with a very adult audience in mind, even though I’m known for YA, it published a couple of years ago to very little fanfare (a deliberate decision on my part). I love the book for its unrelenting narcissism and its absurdly overwrought sex. Plus, it’s way closer to the reality of being a writer than most people want to admit!

As I’ve said in the past, Randall Banner — the book’s unlikeable protagonist — does and says everything I wish I had done and said in my life…and am now so glad I never did!

In a way, Unsoul’d is a look at how Fanboy might have grown up if he’d never met Kyra.

If you’re interested, give it a shot. You can get the super-cheap e-book at Kobo for a mere $3.99. And it’s available everywhere else, too, of course!

Buy the Book!

Kindle | Nook | Kobo | iBooks

Unsoul’d is available as an ebook only. To read an excerpt (almost half the book!), go here.

Batman v Superman: Theory

As you know, I’m not the biggest fan of the upcoming Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. But when the trailer hit a while back, I caught a glimpse of something I thought might be…redeeming? I didn’t have a chance until now to isolate it and write up my thoughts.

Make no mistake: I still have no plans to see the movie, and I’ve basically ignored the chatter about it, so forgive if people are already talking about this, but…is there a possibility the noxious idea of Batman and Superman fighting (again…*yawn*) is due to meddling and an involuntary effort on behalf of the Man of Steel?

Check out these couple of seconds from the first trailer:

http://barrylyga.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/SupesLex.mp4

Sure looks to me like Lex Luthor is controlling Superman. I mean, why else would Kal-El kneel before Lex1?

We can’t be sure if this is blackmail (“Do what I say, Superman, or people die!”) or “I’ve whipped up a kryptonite-based mind-control drug,” but either way, Superman does not look happy to be at Luthor’s beck and call.

This would at least mitigate somewhat the tiresome (and thoroughly trite) Supes-and-Bats fighting bit. And it makes this just-released scene a little more understandable:

Still no plans to see the movie, but if Superman and Batman are fighting against their wills, then the flick will be marginally more tolerable.

As opposed to Zod, natch.

How it Happened: Goth Girl Rising

This is a pretty easy one.

From the moment people began reading The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy & Goth Girl, I got The Question:

When does the sequel come out?

Not “Will you write a sequel?” Just “When?” The assumption was that I would.

And, truthfully, I didn’t plan on doing so. I figured the story was over and, yeah, it was an inconclusive ending, but I like stories that keep you thinking long after they’re done.

And then…

And then I wrote Boy Toy. And without really thinking much about it, I dropped in a couple of references to Kyra and even had her show up for a page (to say something really mean and really true, of course).

She was still with me, Kyra was.

At the end of the first book, Fanboy muses that he and Kyra aren’t superhero characters, that their life isn’t “Fanboy vs. Goth Girl.” That phrase kept coming back to me, and I thought, If I ever write a sequel, that’s what I’ll call it — Fanboy vs. Goth Girl.

I still had no plans for a sequel, but one day this popped into my head:

“Before she went and died, my mother told me to stop bitching about my cramps all the time.”

It was Kyra’s voice, as clear and as true as it had ever been. I wrote that line and the three or four that followed and then I told myself to stop it because, damnit, I wasn’t writing a sequel!

Except I was. Because by then I’d finished Hero-Type. And Fanboy had done really well and had a lot of fans, and Boy Toy had been critically acclaimed, but hadn’t sold well. Hero-Type had been the first book in a two-book deal, and given the sales on Boy Toy, I seriously thought my career was over.

So why not say goodbye with a gift to my readers, the sequel they wanted?

More importantly, why not write the book that had taken up residence in my skull and was making it difficult to think of anything but Kyra?

I knew that the book wouldn’t be exactly what people wanted…and I was OK with that. I knew that readers wanted me to pick up from the end of the first book and show Kyra and Fanboy becoming romantically involved.

But that was too easy. And nothing is ever easy for Kyra.

More likely, I thought, was that things would have changed dramatically after her aborted suicide attempt at the end of the first book. I knew that she would emerge from that experience changed, and not necessarily for the better. That her pain came from a very deep and very dark well, the sort of pain that is not easily expunged.

The title Fanboy vs. Goth Girl suddenly seemed to flippant for what I was attempting. I considered several varieties, including The Astonishing Return of Fanboy & Goth Girl, but settled on… Goth Girl Transcendent.

Or maybe not. I thought a little more and decided Goth Girl Rising worked. (As a friend put it, “What the hell does ‘transcendent’ mean and does anyone care???”)

As I’ve joked in the past, the book ended up being a meditation on being a Millennial woman because who knows better than a middle-aged man?

Still, it seemed to have worked. I got a ton of email from teen girls thanking me the book and marveling that I could get inside their heads so well. (My one super-power, I suppose…)

Fortunately for me, Goth Girl Rising wasn’t my last book after all. Also fortunately, I got to scratch two very personal itches with it.

First of all, I fixed a plot point from the first book. It’s always nice when you can retroactively paper over an oopsie.

Second of all, I wrote probably my favorite bit of indirect characterization ever. It’s something no one ever notices or comments on, but I love it. It happens when Fanboy shows Kyra a picture of the baby he was dreading in the first book. He says:

“See, that’s her. My sister. Well, half-sister, technically.”

In the first book, Fanboy is adamant that the baby a-brewin’ in his mom isn’t his sister. He repeatedly and consistently reminds people that she will be his half-sister.

Now, six months later, the baby has come, and he’s flipped his position. Calling her his sister and only half-heartedly mentioning that “technically” she’s his half-sister.

He’s grown up. He’s learned to love the baby he once referred to as an “alien lifeform.”

I kinda love that line of dialogue.

WiRL: “Let’s Put it in D&D Terms”

Oops! Forgot to post about the latest episode last week…!

Episode 42: The One where Barry Drops the Baby

A discussion of NaNoWriMo. A caution about holiday time in publishing and an invocation of Lyga’s Law. Should authors respond to negative reviews? Comparing books to babies. What would Morgan do if someone panned Gillian Anderson? Morgan looks to her past to figure out her future.

Let There Be No Doubt

I am a very happy geek these days.

 

“Morally Complicated YA”

It wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without a controversy to argue about over the table. This year, rather than debating the Syrian refugee crisis, why not talk about today’s Publishers Weekly article on new YA author Scott Bergstrom?

The article has many in YA up in arms due to some comments made by Bergstrom that seem to, well, denigrate YA. Given that he’s a newcomer, it comes across a bit entitled and snooty. Especially since he’s got book deals in 16 countries, a movie deal, and a six-figure advance. In publishing, you can be a dick and people will shrug it off, but if you’re a successful dick, people hate you.

Here’s the bit that seems to have set people off:

“The morality of the book is more complicated than a lot of YA so I wanted to try doing it on my own,” Bergstrom said. “In a lot of YA, the conflict takes place inside a walled garden, set up by outside adult forces. If you think of those stories as a metaphor for high school, they start to make a lot more sense, but that was one thing I wanted to depart from.”

It doesn’t help that the photo Bergstrom provided is precisely the kind of too-serious, “I am an AUTHOR!” shot that makes other authors simultaneously cringe and howl with laughter.

Yeah.

Look, it would be easy to slag off Bergstrom, to call him a clueless dick who clearly hasn’t read any YA in the past twenty years, etc., but…

I haven’t read all of YA. “A lot of it” really is in high school. Hell, that’s probably true, given the age of the characters. So, fine.
Who knows what else Bergstrom said that PW chose not to include? That’s one thing to consider whenever you read anything about anyone — the publication makes a choice as to what to include and what not to include, and the subject is at their mercy. It’s possible that Bergstrom said many insightful (as opposed to inciting!) things about YA, but PW just didn’t include them.

So, hey — I could spend the day bashing Bergstrom (whom I’ve never met and who is probably a very nice, very talented guy), or I could do something productive.

I choose productive. I believe that the response to something that offends us is not to tear it down, but rather to build up something else. So…

Today and over the long weekend, share your “morally complicated YA.” Bergstrom didn’t invent it. Go ahead and tweet, Tumblr, Facebook, and blog about your favorite morally complex young adult novels. Post them in the comments below, if you like. Have a good time with it!

Trust me, bashing someone for saying something objectionable when you don’t know the context might feel good, but putting a list of great books out into the world will feel so much better.

UPDATE: In the time it took me to write and publish this post, the folks over at B&N have posted a terrific list! Check it out!

UPDATE 2: As so often happens in a world that moves at the speed of light, I’m a day late! I thought the PW article was new — turns out it’s 24 hours old, and people have already been writing about great morally complicated YA (under #MorallyComplicatedYA). Many thanks to Zoraida (in the comments below), and Katherine Locke and Sara Taylor Woods on Twitter for cluing me in. (Clearly, I should look at dates before I post… I was reacting off-the-cuff to what was in front of me, not knowing that others had already picked up the standard and begun marching! I didn’t mean — even inadvertently — to denigrate their work.)

Stories I Never Told: Startling Stories — Rogers

Around the Turn of the Millennium, Marvel experimented briefly with the idea of some slightly “off-brand” versions of certain characters under the banner (pardon the pun that will make itself clear soon) Startling Stories. The idea was, in a nutshell, to take some characters and let a very talented creative team go at them without the burdens of continuity. If the notions panned out, they could be folded into the “official” continuity. If not, well, at least we got a cool story, right?

The first of these was Startling Stories: Banner (see, here’s that pun I promised you). It was a very unvarnished look at the Hulk by Brian Azzarello and Richard Corben. Slightly off-kilter, not entirely bound by continuity, but familiar enough that the differences made the story more powerful.

I came up with two Startling Stories notions of my own. The first was Startling Stories: Rogers. Yes, it was my own weird take on Captain America.

I actually have the original springboard proposal I wrote, so rather than recap the idea, I’ll just present it to you as I originally wrote it back in 2001-ish. And then I’ll be back at the end to talk a little more about it.

Steve Rogers knows all there is to know about being a Captain.

Steve Rogers is about to learn what it means…

…to be America.

STARTLING STORIES: ROGERS

In a hidden government compound in the year 2002, the men in their black, off-the-rack suits once again wake up the Captain. They bring him into the briefing room, remembering the cautions pounded into their heads:

“Do not engage in idle conversation with the Captain.”

“Never answer questions not directly related to the mission at hand.”

“Most important of all, never forget that Captain Rogers thinks that it’s 1947…”

During World War II, Steve Rogers volunteered to be injected with the Super-Soldier Serum, a chemical formula that imbued him with fantastic powers and abilities, making him a one-man army for Uncle Sam.

Do you really think they were going to let that slip away?

Hitler, the men in black tell the Captain, has new allies. He has made an agreement with forces in Colombia to import a deadly drug into the United States. He’s feeding our children poison, Captain Rogers. Something called…cocaine.

Don’t pay attention to their strange clothes and their odd weapons. They may even try to use psychological warfare by telling you bizarre lies, like Hitler is dead, or it’s already past the year 2000.

Don’t listen to them, Captain Rogers. Just do your patriotic duty. Interdict these drug smugglers and come back to base…

So begins Startling Stories: Rogers, an intense, ultra-modern take on Captain America by way of conspiracy theories and the dark side of the American Dream.

In 1945, as it became obvious that the Allies would win World War II, the U.S. government realized that with the end of the war they would also lose one of their greatest assets: the only man to survive Operation: Super-Soldier, Steve Rogers. With hostilities at an end, Rogers would be free to return to civilian life, beyond the control of the military.

So they began a grand cover-up. Rogers was placed in cryogenic freeze (“To help maintain your altered metabolism,” the doctors assured him) in a secret military installation. When needed—by Military Intelligence, by the CIA, by the NSA—Rogers would be thawed, awakened, subjected to briefings that convinced him that it was still the 1940’s…

And then sent out on covert missions against “Hitler” and the “Nazi menace,” threats that had been eliminated years ago.

“Wet works” behind the Iron Curtain. Black ops in Soviet-controlled territories. Even ultra-classified missions in the U.S. itself, infiltrating left-wing groups in the sixties and taking out militias in the nineties. The brainwashed “Captain America” has done it all through the post-War era, the ultimate Cold Warrior, still fighting World War II after all these years.

But then comes a day in the year 2002, when Rogers is sent to combat a growing narco-terrorist cell in South America. On the way, his plane hits rough weather and crashes. Leaving Steve Rogers as the sole survivor…

Loose in an America he could never begin to imagine.

With a wink and nod towards traditional continuity (his code-name of Captain America, his CIA contact named Bucky, cryogenic suspension, and more), Startling Stories: Rogers re-imagines Captain America for the twenty-first century, recasting him as an icon for a nation that is troubled, solipsistic, and deeply cynical. The question at its core: Can the values of the so-called “Greatest Generation” still be brought to bear at the Turn of the Millennium? Or is Captain America’s only function in the modern world to hold a mirror up to what has become a society of extremists and thought-terrorists?

As Rogers attempts to make sense of the new world he finds himself in—as well as the true nature of the government that lied to him—we will learn the answers to these and other questions. By the end of the mini-series, we will have delved deeply into the meaning of America, how it has changed in the years since World War II, and what place a man like Steve Rogers—and the government that spawned him—can possibly have in such a world.

We will also tease the audience with a notion that would be utterly taboo in the Marvel Universe: Is it possible that Steve Rogers (a man born in the 1920s and raised in the 1930s) is a racist?

Startling Stories: Rogers—Hold onto your flags, and get ready for the ride of two centuries.

Whew!

So, let’s get that lingering question out of the way first: Nah, of course Cap isn’t a racist! But it occurred to me that he would be completely ignorant about the progress made in terms of race since World War II. So, I thought I would play around with this and have some fun by showing him being startled and shocked by, say, an interracial couple, or black and whites sharing a meal at a restaurant. He wouldn’t say anything, but it would be obvious that was stunned.

His eventual guide to the 21st century (an ex-CIA operative, natch) would notice his reactions, put two and two together…and assume the old man’s a racist. He would put Cap through a crash course in recent racial history, culminating in a video of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

And Cap would turn from the screen with tears streaming down his face and shock his handler (and, if I’d done my job right, the reader) by saying, “This is wonderful. I always wanted the Negroes to have equality!”

The handler would say, “Well, the sentiment is right. Let’s work on the language.”

Most interesting to me from the remove of many years is that my approach here parallels that taken with the Winter Soldier, created years after I conjured this mess. (As with Mark Waid, apparently Ed Brubaker and I are on a similar psychic wavelength.)

Thoughts on Refugees and Terror

I’m barely qualified to speak on something as enormous and grotesque as the interlinked ISIS terror attacks and Syrian refugee crisis, but that’s never stopped me from shooting off my mouth before.

First, so that you know where I stand: We should let the refugees in.

With that out of the way, let me say a little more…

To me, winning an argument is great, but I truly believe that the way you win an argument is just as important as winning it in the first place. If you win by appealing to people’s baser instincts — like fear — or by lying, then it’s not much of a victory. It’s hollow, like the cheap kind of chocolate Easter bunnies, and it’ll crumble as easily. Not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday. Such a victory will inevitably fall away because it isn’t grounded in anything real. It’s built on smoke and whispers.

I mention this not to excoriate the right — which is currently running the fear offensive at top speed — but also to caution the left. The left isn’t above using fear, even in the case of the Syrian refugees. President Obama and others have warned that turning away the refugees is playing into ISIS’s hands: “I cannot think of a more potent recruitment tool for [the Islamic State] than some of the rhetoric thats [sic] been coming out of here during the course of this debate.”

This sounds nicer and it’s not as blatant as those on the right (and it’s not racist or xenophobic, which is a mark in its favor), but it’s still a fear play. Be afraid, America! If you don’t accept the refugees, you’re letting the terrorists win! And when the terrorists win, someday the bad, swarthy men will come for you!

In short: Don’t think about this. Just be afraid of the outcome I tell you is likely.

But the refugee crisis isn’t about winning or losing. It’s not about fear. It’s about human lives and human decency.

And it’s about facts, not suppositions and speculations and abstractions.

The reality is this: The United States has resettled 784,000 refugees since September 11, 2001. In those 14 years, exactly three resettled refugees have been arrested for planning terrorist activities—and it is worth noting two were not planning an attack in the United States and the plans of the third were barely credible.

That’s the Migration Policy Institute. I don’t know jack about this stuff, but they do — it’s right there in their name.

Facts. Not fears. Three out of three-quarters of a million.

We are in no danger from the refugees. There are systems in place to vet each individual who settles in this country. And for the past decade and a half, those systems have worked very well.

Don’t be afraid. Don’t act out of fear or panic or worry.

Act out of compassion and reason.

People need help. They are not going to hurt you.

Two facts. Forget everything else.

What do you do next?

WiRL: “Do It for Your Husband”

Episode 41: The One where They Argue about “Blazing Saddles”

Why we hate Libba Bray. What special guests would you like to see on the show? Morgan starts a new project. Barry wants to start five new projects. Scheduling time to talk to your spouse. How do you critique something that’s in a genre you don’t like? Plus: A nanny for Leia???

“Kids Today”

Settle in, folks. This is gonna be a long one…

After my recent post on the origins of Hero-Type, I heard (via Tumblr) from a nineteen-year-old reader with the nom d’Tumblr punkcurly.

Hello!

I read your books back in middle school and have re-read some of them a few times.

She goes on to say some nice things about my work and about me, which modesty prohibits repeating here. And then continues…

I am writing you this message today because I read your article about why you wrote Hero Type, and I was very intrigued by your intentions and how they correlated to what I got out of the novel when I read it when I was younger. I think when I first read Kevin’s story, I was appalled at the notion that removing the ‘support our troops’ stickers from his car might be a good thing. I have friends and family that are veterans, and friends serving currently, and I didn’t understand the separation between supporting the choices of my loved ones, and supporting the choices of our government. My political opinions have changed so drastically since I was young, seeing as all I knew was what was being fed to me by my uber religious parents and private elementary school teachers.

I think reading your book did exactly what you wanted it to do to me though. It stirred me up and got me thinking critically for myself for the first time.

Hey, I’ll take that. Look, I don’t write to promote an agenda or to change people’s minds…but Hero-Type is certainly the closest I’ve come to doing so. It’s particularly gratifying to hear that something I’ve written got someone to think a little differently about the world.

I’m 19 now and I don’t agree with my parents on most political and sociological things. I think there’s a stigma about young adults that says that we’re some brand of left-wing pacifist with a social justice warrior outlook on life now, but that will all change once we become truly sensible adults.

I’m curious about what you think about this. Do you think Kevin, and other young adults/teenagers, are only fired up because we’re young and full of heart? Or do you think we’re often right, and its the older generation that cares more about economics than social reform that needs to rethink their positions?

There’s an old saying: “My son is 22 years old. If he had not become a Communist at 22, I would have disowned him. If he is still a Communist at 30, I will do it then.” Meaning, in essence, this: When you’re young, you have no investment in the overarching power structure of society. Therefore, it’s in your best interest to be rebellious and revolutionary, to change the system to your advantage.

As you age, the benefits of living in the system become more apparent  (allegedly) and as you attain status, position, and property, you become less interested in tearing down the status quo and more interested in preserving it.

This is the crux of the issue you mention, and it can best be summed up as “Liberals grow up to be conservatives.” Makes sense in a purely pragmatic manner, but it ignores that people are able to act in ways contrary to their own narrow self-interests, even as they age. The fact that liberals exist all along the age spectrum puts the lie to this notion.

Still, youth is typically the best time to experiment with your politics and your beliefs. You haven’t yet had your philosophy calcified by the drudgery of day-to-day adult life. Your thinking is still flexible enough to juggle disparate ideas and solutions. The odds say that you’ll probably never be as radical as you are right now.

(In college, I lived with five other guys, four of whom were political conservatives. Only one other guy could be considered a liberal, and even he admitted that he was destined to “grow up to be a Republican someday.”)

But none of this is a fait accompli. It’s not as though you turn thirty-five and a random Romney shows up at your front door with your GOP voter card and a lawn sign reading, “I want my country back!” Yes, many people become more conservative as they age…but many others become angrier and angrier by the disparities they see around them and by the fact that these things have not changed (or have changed too slowly). Bernie Sanders is 112 years old (it’s true — look it up) and that dude is as pissed off as an 18-year-old who still has a curfew.

The stigma that you mention is there because it has an element of truth to it. A lot of people get fired up when they’re young and then the realities of a mortgage, taxes, raising kids, etc. pummels them into accepting the world as it is.

And hey — we shouldn’t judge those people! Not one bit. Life is hard. It’s harder for some than for others, but for pretty much everyone, life is hard. If you once cared passionately about the environment, but now all you can do is muster the energy to vote for the candidate who talks the talk on climate change, then that’s fine.

But that’s the thing — just because you stop marching or protesting doesn’t mean you’ve given up. You can still vote for the candidates you believe in. You can still try to explain your beliefs to others who are willing to listen. Maybe you’re not out there in the streets, but ballots count, too. Maybe more.

I’m curious about what you think about this. Do you think Kevin, and other young adults/teenagers, are only fired up because we’re young and full of heart? Or do you think we’re often right, and its the older generation that cares more about economics than social reform that needs to rethink their positions?

I know when you wrote the book the prospect of war was what was laying on a lot of high school and college students plates, as it was a heavy hot-button topic. Do you think this particular subject matter would work today? As a young adult myself I see that we care much less about such things and more about things like getting more power over our own bodies and lives, as well as the rights of others to do as they please. Are we progressing, or do you think our generation is going to fuck up this country big time?

For one thing, I think that your generation, sadly, has grown up knowing nothing but war. When I was your age, we had just invaded Panama, but no big, right? My grandmother used to threaten to send me to Canada because she was convinced Reagan was going to start a war in Nicaragua and restart the draft, but that never came to pass. I knew the Cold War as a kid, but not actual war, not until the first war in Iraq, which — honestly — seemed surreal and not like a real thing. And it came to me when I was an adult (well, a college student), not — as war has for your age cohort — a pre-schooler.

War may not seem like such a hot-button issue to you because you’ve always lived with it.

But that’s not the main issue you bring up. The main issue you bring up is: Are we progressing, or do you think our generation is going to fuck up this country big time?

First of all, understand: We are always progressing. Ask those on the right and they’ll tell you we’re moving ahead too quickly. Ask those on the left and they’ll say we’re moving much, much too slowly. But we are moving ahead. And that’s the important thing.

To answer the second part of your question, the part about fucking up, I have to delve once more into my own past.

At Yale, I was fortunate enough to stumble into taking a history class taught by John Morton Blum, who was something of a legend on campus. As it turns out, the class I took was the last he would ever teach. Blum had hit Yale’s mandatory retirement age, you see, and even though he was still as sharp and as brilliant as ever, the rules were the rules, and he would have to retire.

The class was on American political history between the First and Second World Wars. I won’t bore you with details, but essentially it strove to show how that time period birthed the political movements and issues that still echoed in the nineties (when I was in college).

Blum was a smart guy. (Duh.) And he was good at imparting that knowledge. But, man, he had a mad-on for the GenXers he taught! To listen to him, you would have no choice but to think that everyone my age was either a knee-jerk liberal with no practical sense of the way the world worked or a reflexively heartless right-winger with no conscience.

And truthfully, I started to believe him.

On the last day of class, though — on the last day of his career — something amazing happened.

Blum wrapped up his final lecture early. And then he spoke for a few moments about his time at Yale, about what he would miss, about what he’d been so fortunate to have.

And then he said something like this (paraphrasing from memory, of course — damn, I wish I’d been rolling tape that day!):

I’ve been hard on you this semester. That’s because the world is in bad shape and I want you to understand it. I want you to understand that its problems stretch back into our history. None of these problems are new. And they weren’t created by you. You didn’t vote for Richard Nixon. Or Ronald Reagan. None of this is your fault. I’ve been hard on you, but we’re all counting on you to do a better job than we did. You’ve been very kind to me this semester. Thank you.

It. Blew. My. Mind.

Because, of course, he’s right, and he’s always been right, and he’ll always be right.

The world is not your fault!

This world is your world. You own it. You’re inheriting a world that has been screwed up beyond belief by the people who came before you. And it’s not your fault. You guys didn’t vote for Ronald Reagan — your grandparents did. You guys didn’t vote for George W. Bush — your parents did. You’re not the ones who’ve been ignoring climate change since the 1970s. Again — your parents, your grandparents.

And this is the best part: instead of saying to you, “Oh, God, kids, we’re so sorry we messed up the world. Can you ever forgive us?” they instead decide to give you crap about everything under the sun.

So when some old person starts blathering about “Kids today” and tells you that the world’s going to hell in a hand basket because of your generation and despairs of the future because of “you and your friends,” I want you to turn to them and say, as calmly and as politely as possible, “Don’t you have something IMPORTANT to complain about? Shouldn’t you be out there FIXING THE WORLD THAT YOU FUCKED UP SO THAT I DON’T HAVE TO DO IT FOR YOU?”

Your generation can’t “fuck up this country big time,” punkcurly, because mine and my parents’ and my grandparents’ generations already did that quite nicely for you. Don’t let anyone ever tell you that your generation is at fault — you guys haven’t had the chance to fuck up. The blame for everything you see in the world around you can be squarely and unambiguously laid at the feet of, you know, the olds.

(To be fair, the credit for the good stuff goes to us, too!)

Every generation in history has despaired of the generation to follow. Floating around somewhere on the internet (I can’t be bothered to find it) is a quotation from someone in ancient Rome that basically boils down to “Jesus Christ, what is with kids today?”

Do your best. Follow your passion. Try to leave your small corner of the world a tiny bit better than you found it.

That’s all anyone should ever demand of you.