You Wasn't With Us Shootin In The Gym

I swear I knew what I wanted to do with myself. 30 years ago, 30 days ago, 30 minutes ago, I swore I knew where I was going with this, but there are mad fucking voices in the internet my g.

I woke up today and read articles about living without irony, truth telling about Brooklyn's restaurant scene, re-defining a renaissance as pastime, and of course every Huang's favorite topic of discourse: immortality. This is just another day in 2012.

I get why people would say... Irony is a defensive maneuver; White Brooklyn is overrated; and immortality is within our clutches because I live in 2012, but the thing we have to remember is that we will disagree with all of this in 41 days because it'll be 2013 and in this generation, that's 369 million views of Gangnam Style.

As I sit here listening to Nellie Lutcher's "The Song is Ended... (But the Melody Lingers On)", reading Josh Ozersky impress the White Brooklyn experience on the whole of the borough, drinking a hot soy milk I ordered on my cell phone from my own restaurant, smoking some shit called Durban Poison x OG Kush, I realize that we have every thing and nothing all at the same time.

Even in a post-Sandy-recession-America, we're paralyzed by choice and many times... opportunity. I can remember what soup dumplings tasted like when I was 6. I can remember exactly how I felt when Webber called the timeout and I can tell you what it was like watching the Berlin Wall come down, but I can't for the life of me remember what I wanted to do 20 minutes ago without google calendar. I can't write without a billion fucking digital sticky notes and I can't be on time for anything even if all I had to do is put on underwear and click on Skype, but it's not because I'm not trying. I am.

But it's also not because I don't have the resources because I do. Anyone who tells you they "can't" do something is lying. Anything is possible and not only is it possible, but it's possible this AM, this PM, ASAP, EOD, and if you're across 110th St: V$VP. Yet, every day I fuck it up. Why is it that we have every thing and nothing all at the same time? Because we let old fools TELL US we're fucking it up.

I like that we respect the past. I like that we shop vintage, design retro, and eat slow. I like the resentment our generation has for the mundane, the processed, the co-opted. I like that it's not good enough to just drink beer unless its incredibly shitty cheap beer or incredibly overpriced artisinal beer with a clever name and transcendental graphic design that somehow says every thing we need to know in 12oz increments. I like that people see the value in old dim sum parlors or Mario's on Arthur Ave. We are expected to know what's best. We are expected to know all. We are expected because we have access.

But look Mom and Dad, our "access" and our opportunity is a lie just like that time they dangled Miami in front of Lefty (Donnie Brasco). The internet is just a really fast newspaper. Iphones are just another layer and parents just don't understand that our generation has its own challenges. The same questions you couldn't answer about life, happiness, and existence elude us too. The internet only holds what we put in it. So get the fuck out of my head and let me live.

We want nothing of the middle. We want to celebrate the margins. We try really hard to project meta slacker. Yet, despite Hanna Horvath's mesmerizing attempts to cloak this generation in a blanket of 70/30 USDA choice ground apathy leaking out of a spaghetti strap, we are a VERY ambitious generation. Every Girl in "Girls" is a socially paralyzed product of this generation, but they're not real. They're flat pawns, being moved around in an allegory by a 26 year old woman who will probably run the world in 3 internet years i.e. episode 5 of Season 2. They are caricatures. And although Dinesh D'Souza and friends paint Obama as a left-leaning crazy "trapped in his father's time machine", he is an inspiring boring centrist half-black President who will never make anyone happy because the trademark of this generation is not entitlement but EXPECTATION. We are drunk with the weight of expectation.

Yes, this is our generation: a hyper ambitious lot that's running around like a chicken with no head being portrayed as irreverent, nihilistic, and ironic, but actually trying really fucking hard to live up to the expectations. A place in time where cats chase dogs, girls run the world, and Brooklyn is overrated. When every thing is at our fingertips, it all seems so far away. I don't see my friends, I don't hear my friends, but no matter how much I text, tweet, email, and skype, I miss playing Marvel v. Capcom with my friends on a couch eating cookies from this farm called Pepperidge which I don't believe was actually a farm at all. I go to Katz, I go to Russ & Daughters, John's on 12th, Rao's, and read Andrew Zimmern wax poetic about Uncle Tai's, but what do I know about 1970s New York? Nothing. Absolutely nothing at all. I like it better because I wasn't there. And people shit on irony, or Brooklyn, or Kobe because they weren't there with a mother fucker shooting in the gym.

But we are... We're here. So own up to it mother fuckers. Broke don't look good on nobody. We want to be rich. We want to ride chrome. We want to leave our mark. So when people tell us it used to be better or Josh Ozersky tells Brooklyn it's delusional or Wampole tells you to live without irony, tell them to suck a holographic bag of dicks because it's 2012 mother fucker and we don't give a fuck, except when WE decide we do.