I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness

by Claire Vaye Watkins

At a deeper level perhaps, I wanted to extricate some meaning from all the horror and carnage, to step back into the nightmare and find something worth salvaging.

My mother never got to make everything she wanted to make, to build even a fraction of what she wanted to build. Still, she built a lot.

“The Oregon Trail Generation is us!” said Ty. “The generation that came of age along with the internet. Born in the eighties. Last of the analog natives. We had landlines and grew up to be digitally fluent. We played the Oregon Trail on Mac IIs in grade school and had cybersex on home PCs in middle school. Dial-up in high school, ethernet in college.”

He said, “It’s about cognitive dissonance and the impossibility of empathy and the impossibility of ethical consumption under capitalism and coming of age with the internet.