Private Citizens

by Tony Tulathimutte

And cities that tolerated everything tolerated mediocrity.

Of course, eventually party had to deflate from verb to noun, but there was no renouncing indulgences you hadn’t exhausted.

Her generation’s failure was not of comprehension but of compassion, of splitting the indifference; its juvenile taste for making a mess; its indignant reluctance to clean it up; its limitless capacity for giving itself a break; its tendency to understand its privilege as vindication. And they weren’t even happy.

3.2 To my half brother Dick Macy (emphasis on HALF and DICK) I leave sincere wishes for a quick death pinned under your WaveRunner.

Nonprofits, he learned, supplicated the idle rich, ate young hearts, and defrauded the middle class.

Cultures of permission valorized bad taste as liberation. Ecosystems needed predators. Yet San Francisco was nothing if not vegetarian.

But only idiots expected sincerity; anyone with life experience perceived things through a proper corrective filter of mistrust.

She did coke for the energy to work to buy coke.

This from some old white dickshaker who thought there was such a thing as overthinking.

Accidental parents constantly had a telescope trained jealously out into the social universe, were always checking on the latest from Planet Abortion, and Eve would pornographically interrogate Linda about social goings-on.

A wiry man in a seersucker dress shirt and gray slacks with a worryingly conservative part in his brown hair, a sort of human wingtip, took the stage with a microphone.

John Grabanger was senior by far, a stubbly, ptotic man who tended to comport himself like some vital ambassador of the sixties sent to steer society off its present crash course—and in that sense he was conservative, the way some radicals believed their battles would never obsolesce, and rather than embrace change ended up regressing to the root of radical: radix, root, subterranean and immovable and bitter, as they mistook unanticipated forms of progress for decline. But

Eugene kept a knee brace and an eyepatch in his map hutch to invalidate field sobriety tests.

Talkin’ about freedom here. Work a job, you got a boss. Run a business, you got customers. That’s your life if you go to college, only worse, ’cause then you get a giant stick up your ass about being smart. Smart don’t make you less stupid, though. You’re never gonna get the money or respect you think you deserve.

She hated the pretentious rituals of conspicuous concealment, everyone breaking their necks whenever two people walked toward a bathroom. Integrity meant doing your drugs in public and alone.

And yes, the romance of smoking was pure product placement, but it was still the sexiest way of hating yourself.

Vanya went quiet as she worked toward inbox zero, leaving Will to quietly process the everyday aggressions of the word actually.

Roopa wasn’t exactly stupid, not even ill-intentioned—just unconditionally confident, which was sort of worse.

Fuck Bush, marry Rumsfeld, kill Cheney, become Rove.

She tells him he’s so insecure he’s postmodern. He says she’s being emotionally litigious.