I can stomach the unbuttoned Valentino jacket with the dark, tapered Levis, a forgiveness resting largely upon this man’s choice of dress shoe. What I cannot abide is the over-starched, triangular vegetable knives he thinks are throwback lapels, urgently threatening my jugular as he leans in to introduce himself. They’re screaming at me in an electric lime and harkening to a decade, three shy of this guy’s birth. Too much retro, not enough metro. It’s a fraught dynamic when there’s a wrinkle in your forehead older than your interviewer.

Now, Jack at the coffee cart, who syncs my daily brew and fresh buttered roll with the uptown express bus opening its rear doors, will tell you that the primary moment of truth in a job interview is the smiley, first impression you make the instant you set foot in the honcho’s office-office. Addie over at the hair salon, I call a barber shop, claims we never quite evolved from the grip mythos of a deal-sealing handshake. She says firm is still key. Mike, the polished, unaffordable, $300-an-hour professional career counselor who owes me twelve favors and is hoping to parlay them into just one big one, has been coaching me on my elevator pitch and repeatedly regaling me with his old client’s personal moment of truth back in ’05.

The way Mike tells it, some wiz visited his target company several days early and pinpointed the best reverberation point in the echo chamber of the all-marble, Citibank corporate lobby. Later, on the day of his interview, he waited in that spot for the hiring manager to come spinning through the revolving doors and then he faked a quick flip-phone call that was a conversational version of his own pitch. His voice bounced all over the walls and floor. Detail, detail, detail, the guy was hired without even having to go through an interview. His moment of truth was characterized as acting on a longshot.

When it comes to landing a decent position, though, those tropes are only really “moments of truth” for the person conducting the interview. They are barely what one could call moments. Not a lick of them has got anything to do with truth. Each is a castaway mote on an imagined periphery, something meant to take a random foothold in a stranger’s recollection that they can later fashion into a bonus check for “finding” you. Yes, you. You who braved thirteen questionable rush-hour stops on the pre-dawn J train; one downhill urine puddle; two codeine pimps; one service dog trying to eat someone else’s comfort dog; a blockade of pushy flyer guys; a barefoot beggar with no shirt and inexplicably nice pants; six randos side-toting volcanically active gyros at eight in the morning; the bubble boy; an open fire hydrant; eleven million pigeons; the invisible forcefield around obvious lawsuit lady; a line of smelly campers waiting for Taylor Swift tickets; the elbow of the jogger going against foot-traffic whilst checking his throbbing neck; a questionable jackhammer operator; a child-swallowing escalator; and a radicalized would-be terrorist who is having a challenging day with his girlfriend — just to plop yourself three feet in front of this stranger’s schnoz. Boom, he found you!

No. In a job interview, I only get one moment of truth, real truth, and that’s right now. It’s not a very impressive little signal, but I can spot it like a hawk on a dying field mouse. Berluti Oxfords is going to pull out of this combination handshake and overly welcoming off-hand to my shoulder to invite me to sit. I’ll thank him. He’ll do his best GQ fierce around the titanic hickory desk whose purchase price could’ve fed three ex-employees’ families for a year while I bend into the armless, most artsy, minimalist, visitor chair, trying to defy gravity in a way that doesn’t cause a fake fart noise on the leather cushion. I’ll adjust once, to greater pains than before, and then sit motionlessly at attention. He’ll end up in a gently diminishing sway in his sasquatch cathedral of a chair, striking some pose where he tries to make lumbar support look breezy and cool. I’ll gesture to hand him the résumé from my leather binder. It’s arduously formatted, painstakingly constructed, and expensively printed on thirty-two pound linen paper in eggshell crème. It’s made it through a nerve-wracking minefield of transfers without a single blemish or ding to any corner — Kinkos manager; to Kinkos kid; to wrongly sized free folder; to overpriced manila envelope; to sauna subway tunnel; to kitchen table covered in sweaty glasses; to wife’s hands; to mine; to cleaner wife’s hands at my insistence; to lopsided drawer; to zipped binder; to little wobbly table by our door; to unzipped binder when I checked the résumé was still in there; to the same on Tuesday when I forgot the answer; to coffee cart proxima; to three public transportation hubs; to unique pronoun receptionist who handed it immediately back; to this yahoo’s interview.

He’ll refuse it. He’ll verbally note that he has a copy on his desk, indicating the last of his office’s mistakenly Valentine’s pink, bulk order printer paper upon which the job search website has parsed and incorrectly re-congealed the demanding triumphs of my career into a useless Courier font that spills over margins set to imaginary numbers. That one has been spooled to some refurbished travesty of off-brand Meca Godzilla, streaking faint vertical toner lines down the length of my hard-won history and crimping on select legible text in favor of revealing how their printer wildly misaligns every lowercase g, q, j, and p, all while failing to print page two. Then he’ll ignore the pink printout to look at my entry on his phone. I’ll replace mine to its protective pocket, accidentally dog-earing every corner in the maneuver. He’ll spend forty-five seconds futilely trying to figure out how to scroll in all four directions on his tiny screen before giving up. Then, he’ll place the phone, face-up, at arm’s length onto whatever part of the desk most amplifies vibration and, right there, I have my moment of pure and unadulterated truth.

His transition back, from touchscreen to actually starting the interview, has a tell. We’re only a few seconds into our acquaintance, but he’ll either jump directly to the all-important, interview eye-contact harped upon by everyone from my bow-legged postal carrier, Sonny, to Darla, the loneliest TSA agent at LaGuardia, or he’ll engage in a quick wrestle with the pink résumé, looking for something to talk about. When it’s the latter, I know he hasn’t read a single line.

In the Himalayan mass of bothersome derelictions that pass for a 21st century applications process, such is a capital peeve of mine - interviewers who haven’t read a résumé. You can tell in a matter of milliseconds. There’s one type of glance at the page that’s just a person tardily making certain they got my name right, three feet and as many seconds ago. Sometimes there’s a pat glare verifying that the assistant who did the heavy lifting of putting a single sheet of paper on his desk, chose the correct person’s documentation. Apparently, that’s a rampant problem in the corporate sector that no one thought to reverse by changing hiring practices. There’s also this tiny, down-up glimpse, at speed, that I’ve since determined has something to do with false confidence in instantly sizing-up hundreds of résumés on-the-fly, but full-on corporate anxiety attacks at even the mere inkling of someone having submitted a proper curriculum vitae. But the last look, the wided-pupil, page-bouncing, tight-jawed, noggin dance that resembles the panic when your cainophobic friend’s favorite donut is sold out behind the glass display, that one’s the tell. Again, it’s milliseconds in delivery, but fully detectable by the onlooker when you know how to spot it. These extra-fractional tics are spent frantically scanning your now impossible salad of wordage for some shared key term to break the ice. He wants to find a single spot that reads, “Harvard” or “Boeing” or “Footsie.” But, too rushed for eyes to land on anything other than my professionally metaphoric use of “concierge,” which he silently misunderstood as “consigliere,” and we’re off to the races with an opener resembling, “So tell me. Why DO you want to work here at Idiot, Moron & Lunk?”

My interviewer had two jobs, and he thinks that sitting on his ass through the second, successfully fakes that he’d completed the first. It’s an insult because I’ve been ignored. It’s a peeve because it’s, nowadays, going on a 50/50 shot, citywide — who does and who doesn’t consider reading comprehension a skill outside of poorly captioned ’Grams and loose delivery promises in the Temu fine print.

There’s an entire industry devoted to identifying and discerning creative methods to convey any applicant’s highly individualized, personal pluses to a hiring manager, often in a fashion that absolves them of reading. It’s called outplacement, an unfortunate name for an industry too often confused with outsourcing jobs overseas or displaced people needing social services here at home. It resembles neither. It’s a wildly successful sector offering frequented high-end seminars, trainings, mock negotiations, franchising opportunities, skills refreshers, pitchbook construction, career matching, pitch building, interview coaching, and even redeployment within the organization you do not wish to leave. But getting through the résumé basics with ten experts on the case is a chore.

Repeat these key words to supplant the digital gatekeeper. Use active terms versus passive ones. Grate numbers over the whole of your accomplishments like a parmesan cheese. Type “synergy” a lot. Tiny, square bullet points are all the rage. Dare to use a complex sentence in your cover letter, but only if it’s surrounded by simple sentences, contains no more than one comma, and the whole of the body is limited to a single paragraph not exceeding 200 characters. Remember, people don’t want to see your semi-colons. Avoid accent marks, even if that’s how you spell your name. If you earned more than $60,000 a year, your résumé should fill two pages, but three is a cardinal sin. Printers hate narrow margins. Adverbs on a résumé are veritable career suicide! Yet even with all that and ten thousand other hoops hurtled through to get into the torture device I am only ironically referring to as this chair, there’s still the matter of concocting a wow factor, on or off paper, as if a résumé were a post-hypnotic suggestion grenade.

1988, the twenty-fourth candidate for a lighting design position in an off-Broadway theatre walks though their double doors and forks over a résumé. Everyone had similar experience, but in the header where the lot had identified themselves as lighting designers, this person self-described as “Designer of Light and Shadow.” Hired! No reading.

2005, the eighth graphic designer whose résumé had landed them preliminary interview time enough to show off their portfolios was the final person in the full bunch to have constructed their résumé from plain Microsoft Office templates. The ninth incorporated her own graphic design elements into her original résumé. Hired! No reading. No portfolio review.

2016, last interview in a series of three each, for three separate, short-listed candidates seeking the Department Head role in English at a well-known university. That was, until the newly minted and very green vicechair pointed out that pursuant to an HR typo in the questionnaire meant to accompany each application, every last candidate had both missed and personally repeated in their answers, the word “compliment,” when the context called for “complement.” Hired! No reading. Almost no pertinent experience. Vicechair was now Provisional Department Head, skipping four levels from his previous station.

My interviewer cannot yet tell that the bulk of my experience hails from the outplacement industry. Mainly, he cannot tell because he clearly doesn’t read résumés. I am insulted for all job applicants, not just myself. He cannot fathom I am sitting here with a colleague’s best advice running on a loop in my head, “Either he’s going to hold your age against you, or he’s not. If he is, there’s nothing you can do about it. If not, there’s nothing to worry about.” This guy’s lax review practice is the darkest shade of an abysmal quasi-morality that is the sudden social acceptance of what many other interviewers do as a matter of course. They read the résumé and immediately disregard its content. I should not be surprised when people who video-chat all day to minimized, 2D faces in the crooks of their aching palms cannot make eye contact across a deep desk for more than one blink. Or worse, making in-person eye contact gives them anxiety enough to forget what they’ve asked and to not listen to my answers. My industry only exists, can only, at all, function on the driven predilection that there also stands a low bar, a hard deck at the base of common human decency, respect, and communication below which even the worst hiring manager is unwilling to go. We can study everything that might proceed from that hard deck, all that might occur above it on a histogram. But we cannot study what you don’t do, what you won’t do, what you failed to do.

While I begrudge none of the storied hirees either their landed positions or their noteworthy, wow-factor methods, from echo chambers to the now novel idea of demonstrating a competitive mastery of English when looking to head a department named after English — I remain conflicted. Having navigated a career in outplacement means that I know, for every story I hear about the woman who landed her dream role simply because her stellar business reputation preceded her or about the fellow who got a magic foot in the door by joining his boss’ niche online group of fantasy-subway-map enthusiasts, there are between eighty and a hundred other people a pop who, for months upon months, drudged through every last particular they were supposed to address to perfect their résumés and make shine their interview techniques. Against the backdrop of the thousands of thoughtless, spammed, knuckle-dragging résumés from Myanmar that bots have piled up digitally on the company email servers, this handful of folks have researched and personalized every cover letter, targeted specific best fits, heeded guidance about every minor detail from staple placement to kerning to accessibility mainstays to editing until the narrow breaks between résumé sections would fall right where folds would appear should ever civilization crash and we start mailing things again. They have spent a huge chunk of their lives, reducing said lives to a list. They write, and re-write, and again, all while a nonstop chorus of expert advice harmonizes almost demonically with the voices of every Tom, Dick, and Harry at the library and the dry cleaner chanting, “Start over! Make your list more exciting! Start over again! Make your list a readgasm!”

I like when folks find a shortcut to a job, a good one. To whatever degree one might refer to America as “an experiment,” amidst whatever else, it only ultimately succeeds if everybody who can work, does. Laudable shortcuts embolden that, they help make it happen. Yet, there remains something lugubrious about an increasingly common job search landscape which ensures that, not only will these impeccable, dazzling documents, remain forever unread, but, as in my case today, remain completely untouched as I attempt to hand it along. And this to the one guy who is supposed to want to see it. Did I say untouched “documents?” I meant unvalued lives. Welcome to my life as a list.

So, today, I’ve taken a wow-factor cue from those who’d leapfrogged the process. I’ve tried something new. Here’s the moment of truth that I’m seizing. My interviewer, all up-branded watch with his drop fade haircut and pounding Paco Rabanne cologne, he’ll make small talk about what they are looking for in a candidate and he’ll listen with half an ear as I answer whether I think I’d be a fit. I’ll crowbar in some commentary about my career highlights, driving home an anecdote about the boisterous, billionaire captain-of-industry who insisted I should use him as a reference and dare to place his name and personal cell number right at the bottom of my résumé. I’ll mention off-handedly that the captain is a bit full of himself and refused to get sidelined to lesser documents bearing the contact information for my second-to -last, since-fired middle-manager and my most recent interim head of HR looking to avoid further unemployment payments. At the name drop, this guy will salivate a little, jerking his attention from incoming texts in his not-so-peripheral vision to an excitedly renewed interest in the pink page in front of him. He’ll report that he doesn’t see the name or number there and I’ll remark on how his company's web platform wouldn’t allow me to individually parse non-résumé data into the résumé section of the site. Offering him a bone, I’ll say something like, “Don’t worry, I’ll leave you with my own copy when we’re done.” We’ll move on, chatting and discussing my professional merits via his now honed focus on my candidacy, a conversation into which I’ll sprinkle a humble-sounding, but not too overdone, cavalcade of lucks into which I’d fallen when several predecessors turned out to be sadly unable to do their jobs correctly. We’ll finish on some high note. It will include a shared laugh. He’ll round the desk again for a final handshake. I’ll cut that one short, feigning that I’d almost forgotten to leave him my copy. I’ll tender it. He’ll take care not to rudely read it right away while we are still interpersonally trademarking our pleasantries. I’ll to the elevator and he’ll shut his door.

When he doesn’t see the name and number at the bottom of that one, he’ll start going through my most excellent content. However, this time, rather than listing out everything I’ve done professionally and every place I’ve worked myself to death, impressive job titles and spans of years that peg me as nearing AARP; I’ve replaced each section with an aspersion on poor HR practices, each bulleted entry with a pet peeve. It’s a menu of misgivings about the employment process, a list of well-phrased wrongs, starting with an objective section that speaks of my intention to root out insulting, disrespectful, and half-assed interview habits, city-wide. Behold my Peeves Résumé, the trainwreck one now cannot refrain from reading in full! My would-be profile section will plainly paint me as a finder of flaws, after which, what would have been job titles and responsibilities catalogued in their greatest scope and scale, will instead flush out all the hiring manager “don’ts” of an application process. I doubt he’ll realize that the order in which I’ve listed them could only so closely match the order in which he’d demonstrated each transgression pursuant to my seasoned experience in such matters. “Experience,” a word mentioned fourteen times in their job post and eighteen times in the recruiter’s breakdown of the role before sending me to HR K-pop and their leader, Don YouTube.

I do, though, think he’ll take particular note of the adage where my special skills section would otherwise be. We never covered my research skills or my ability to take the most esoteric corporate practices and assess their impact on the bottom line, but I always perform my due diligence and I hope it shows through. That last passage notes how I’ve already honed the included points into both a pitchbook and a departmental overhaul proposal that I’ve presented to his C-Suite ahead of his boss vacating her own higher position a week from now. If Nick Jonas ever flips to page two, he’ll see that I’ve included a parenthetical.

(Don’t worry, I told your CEO that I’m sure your department would never engage in any of these heartless, costly practices. I furthered that all we need to do to start saving a cool $2M is to canvas honest assessments from a list of applicant phone numbers we already have.)

I do not know you,

as if ever one could,

you in the bible cover

under onion skin,

but always they called you Little Chistine

the last and the tiniest

that hollow leaf on the dead branch

when they spoke reluctantly about family.

That’s you.

It’s a spot with no picture,

a sprout barely green,

on a twig that had stretched its limit

petering out into the fathoms of an alternatively browning spine.

The ink still looks fresh for you

as inks do when they beckon

dots pronouncing where a loving hand sometimes hesitated

in your namesake cursive

silently screaming in indigo how you must be found.

That’s you.

I bring myself to the old coal town,

my first time where we’d kindled as Americans,

a tiny town for a tiniest you

home to little else than three churches and seven sprawling cemeteries.

There are more people dead here than living here

many of them ancestors

and my notebook is out

my sad, erasable pencil scratching forth and back as I

one by one

spot every one

all save for one.

That’s you.

Two broiling days

measured in faded headstones

hot to the touch

and I thirstily begin again

square one, grave one

in the cheat of dusk with a flashlight

overnight without a wink

and a third beginning come breakfast-time

because I must have missed you,

Little Christine.

My scour now less a pattern than a frenzy

knowing you are here

in an old and hollow space

around this bend or that

for which I grow feverish

the burn in my chest, the flames in my calves,

a sun sooner to crisp than to light a way

no closer to being able to say it.

That’s you.

Cruelly our memories neglect

and so bitterly the records repeat

with cantankerous blanks from the paper bomb

as much use as ash

and my frustrated temperature rises.

But then a small, Russian cross

carved in Ukrainian Cyrillic

a headstone sidelong on the path

well mossed and moist and cool in the shade

its figures hidden but for a few shadows from bulbous, stony creases.

I clear it apace with my burning hands

my forehead ablaze without and within

a flash and a rush

but I cannot read it.

This alphabet and I are strangers

its figures all melty and queer

waves of embossed, watery characters in granite

trying in vain to wash away one too many somethings

and then longing to tell me the tale

when stones became inks

going deftly unheard as it bellows out the unspoken story of a child

taken in her crib

taken in fire.

That’s you.

The problem required a professional’s verification. The sheriff was insistent. Several safety-yellow, hydraulic brutes rolled over their garden. The cesspool cover was removed, ripe sewage tainting the air. A crew of five men took turns precariously balancing on the edge of the hole, shining lights and poking downward with poles. Last week’s moaning continued; sad, whalish, inhuman grousing. She presented now only as a plump, half-submerged, dark brown mass, strung between walls the way cheese pulls from hot pizza. But Gladys was a ward of the state and her sentence had not included the neighbors she’d wronged switching to vegan.

I very strongly disagree with the manner in which our pop culture both misunderstands and then subsequently "misuses" generation names. First to note, these are not hard and fast categories. It is not like the naming of a generation comes from either an official need to do so or a traditional framework that happens according to certain parameters. Every state has a state bird, every U.S. President has some favorite snack on record, pretty much for the sake of lightheartedly knowing weird trivia like Ronald Reagan was the jelly bean president. It's as if to say, "We've tracked it before, therefore it's a thing we should always track." I’m not against that, but that’s not how it works with naming generations.

Widely started with Tom Brokaw's book, "The Greatest Generation" giving rise to that phrase popularly being attached to those who fought in WWII; referring to a generation by a collective name was neither something we'd traditionally tracked, nor something that was even a sociological measure. The name of a generation is basically a meme, repeated enough times that everyone knows the ad hoc reference. It’s a matter of multiple authors or speakers through multiple platforms throwing different names against a wall and not even anticipating which will stick. We treat the names of generations (and even what we might numerically consider to be half-step generations) as if there is science to it, as if there’s a cut-off date where one officially begins, and another officially ends. We treat the act as if there is some sort of official process a body of similarly aged persons is filtered through to arrive at a factual result. There is nothing official and almost nothing resultantly factual about it. Sure, it’s somewhat helpful to collectivize voting blocs by age and, if you do you, you’ll need a manner in which to refer to them in conversation. But beyond that, the name of a generation, the span of time it supposedly covers, and the manner in which we come by a name is all traditionally happenstance by design.

Some of the names that happened to stick (Greatest Generation, Baby Boomers, Me Generation) generally did so in presumed relation to observable and pan-applicable commonalities shared by the persons said to be part of that bloc. Greatest Generation, as a title, was a broad capture, associating folks by who’d lived in The Great Depression and then fought in that world war. Though broad, that was an easy one to understand because, globally, no one was untouched by those two world events.

Flimsily trying to use that touchstone as what makes a generation, the commonality factor, then we had the narrower commonality of Baby Boomers, people born in large numbers soon after the war when soldiers returned home and started families. I mean, I am quite certain that with very few statistical outliers, all those people had something more in common throughout the longest lives in recorded history, than the mere timing of their births, perhaps even predominantly so. While not everyone in that group would have been a greaser or a rock ‘n’ roll fan or a target for McCarthyism, that generation could have just as easily been named The Tail Fins Generation or the TV Generation or The Desegregation Generation. How bizarre the stretch to need to start naming groups by birth brackets and how much more bizarre the almost accidental stretch for commonality to reach the name “Baby Boomers?”

I begrudge no one their attempt to add a literary moniker to a group. But the rest of us have lost the plot. Naming a generation, as is now a new tradition, carries about as much weight as being born under a given constellation. It’s a forced preamble. When you hear of a generation by name, your mind would do well to temporarily rename it in your head to something like The Scorpio generation before discussing it. Do not draw suppositions from these titles.

In fact, if we put that happenstance design under a microscope, in absence of the, say, every-digit meaning that goes into something like a social security number or, say, a system by which we know when the ensuing year will be the Year of the Monkey; the few “practices” you can conclude that go into naming a generation are thus:

1) They tend to be based upon a perceived commonality

2) They tend to be named after-the-fact, often by people not part of that generation

3) While there is an unconscious acceptance of the name, the way there is of a meme, people belonging to that generation generally do not get to pick and choose their own group moniker.

4) We call it a whole generation, as if global, but the chosen names tend to be situationally limited to Americans.

Fast forward to the name that stuck with my generation, Generation X. There are scant few born later than us who even remotely know that Gen X was the name that stuck to us as Coupland’s book was trying to follow this oh-so-loose commonality tradition. We were called Generation X supposedly because there was no, one single commonality between us. The X was like an unknown in a math equation. In fact, “Generation X” was an older phrase borrowed from previous generations, back then meaning disenfranchised youth or alienated teens, a phrase originally intended to separate out a body of persons from the larger generational bloc; which, almost ironically, was first applied to the same generation we now call boomers. Shorthand, “Generation X” as a term was meant for “greasers,” but never stuck. Decades later, post Me Generation and/or Silent Generation, Coupland’s version stuck during a period of time when everything out of Hollywood was made to sound more exciting by use of an “X” (X-Files, American History X, the origins of Netflix, the film for Malcom X, X-Men, The Matrix, and for those who get the Stargate meta-reference, “Wormhole X.”). This newer version was a sort of anti-commonality describing mainly kids of the 70s and 80s as having no, one, big, shared factor that would define us in distinctive parallel against other groups, named or unnamed.

So, this is where the misuse and misunderstanding comes in. Gen Y and Gen Z were then “chosen” to follow Gen X, misinformedly so, as if there had been a Gen D, Gen E, and Gen F. There were not. The scotoma-adjacent grand explanation for the appearance of the new terms is a repeated, meme-driven supposition that the practice is derived from an implied sequencing, like naming this year’s hurricanes in alphabetical order or sticking decimal points after new releases of computer applications. Again, this had never been. Such ignores all four, now frequented, ingredients to how generations take on names: perceived commonality in the title, not getting to choose your own generational group name, an American focus, and getting named in some semblance of hindsight. That’s before we even mention that “Gen Y” and “Gen Z,” likewise, lack much of the “throw it against a wall and see what sticks” quality, among several options, as had been the case for others since we’d started the practice.

Gen Y, if there is such a thing, whether referred to that way or alternatively labelled as millennials, are only passively referenced, without any more meaning or identity than being in direct shadow of another generation, or in an even narrower, boomer-like, birth proximity to a specific, but almost numerically mundane date. They have a date-name that linguistically prescribes everyone born for about 99 years into a single millennial status, despite the arbitrary and wildly disparate year brackets assigned them, those generally topping out across all barely overlapping OPINIONS somewhere in the late 90s. It’s all accidental, but nonetheless hogwash! The youth of Gen Y and Gen Z deserve better.

Further, the quick-to-stick presumption that there is only sequencing and no meaning in naming a generation, the precept that gives us “Gen Y” as a term, effectively erases the once au courant and poignant gravitas of “Gen X.” It is as if what little identity GenXers would take from that title has been erased and forgotten. We were on track to be predominantly called The Slacker Generation, The Latchkey Generation, or the MTV Generation, the lot having to do with the perceived breakdown in family values and work ethic, all names that we seemed to accept as we grew up and proved them ironic or wrong. Yet we happily accepted “Gen X” and its actual meaning as this sort of badge. It was as if the observation of our collective dissimilarity was an indication that we’d finally reached a flexion point in American freedoms. We were an unboxable, undefinable, je ne sais quoi, accepting enough of all peoples that no one trait rose to the top as widely applicable. It is a name that we continued to proudly embody well into our adult years. It was a name that simultaneously flipped the script from previous groups, while coming about under the same accepted conditions.

Now, sequencing it into a small, meaningless enumeration, Gen X is suddenly not the last fortunate generation to have had deeper meaning in its label, mine even against a powerful backdrop of disproven prejudgments, but instead the first generation in our ever-more-passive acceptance of thinking as if we are machines. Do we need to name generations? No. Nor do we constellations or ships or songs. But there is this inherent marginalization that comes from ascribing a namelessness to any person or any group. And when that namelessness has the absent-minded power to look back from a forced void and thrust that emptiness onto other people, ideas, and mainstays, it’s not just a misunderstanding…it’s a revisionist history, a poorly applied presentism that seeks to define the past in terms of today, including the baseline premise that today’s definition is zero sum. This is not the act of being misinformed as much as it is the black hole equivalent of what it takes to remain uninformed.

My 16-year-old, born in 2007, and my 11-year-old in 2012, have a full-out argument about once every four months as to whether or not they belong to the same generation, always followed by the conclusion that they do not, and the ensuing, unavoidable “why my generation is better than yours” debate in anger. They are only four-and-a-half years apart. And it’s no wonder when they are pulling their evidences from varied teachers, citing varied look-ups, all with sporadic assignments of year brackets and pop confusion about which name might belong where on a timeline. Plus, there’s all the misapplications of similar look-ups across YouTube voices and TikTok videos. “Why” never comes into it.

Is it not more useful to append those new labels and instead talk about the possibility of a Pandemic Generation, tracing their collective gap in education and/or income out into the results of seasoned adult lives? How about the Generation of Political Divide, the slews upon droves of children in the millions raised during the most politically divisive and longest sustained 50/50 split in our governance in history? I could list a hundred possibilities, none of which changes who an individual is, what they face, or how they overcome. The point is that the blind and uninformed acceptance of a non-existent system yielding meaningless names, works against anything that would allow an applicable name to stick; works against that last bastion of passive, unilateral agreement that is everybody looking up from a book or paper or a broadcast or even an Instagram post and silently nodding to themselves, saying, “Yeah, yeah, that’s us.” One cannot hope to use a benign placeholder, now, and expect something better will automatically arrive to supplant it in the collective psyche. In a world where no 18-year-old can be provided the impetus to cross-reference beyond scanning the first couple sentences in each of the first two Google hits, the placeholder is their answer, their truth, their go-to, even when they do not know what the heck they are talking about. People have formed a comfortable, cognitive dissonance from their informational sources that functions much the same way that we’ve overwhelmingly distanced ourselves from our food sources. Using the term "Gen Z" is little different from ordering something from a menu that just says, "Meat."

Generations are strange, as we view them, collecting folks together in groups not by their true time on this Earth, but ultimately by their first twenty years. That’s quite the narrow gap in which to debate a shared start date and end date, particularly when there is disagreement. Then sometimes we skew the results around some linchpin commonality the way redistricting can either positively solidify voting blocs or disenfranchise them with an arbitrary line down the middle. The best thing we can do is to stop referring to present and future generations by letters and numbers and systems, and instead let them craft the umbrellas that will hang over all their heads until a decent, studied hindsight can identify what color that umbrella should be.

Sometimes I need you to unlove me

so that you could find me again

after I’ve dusted myself off and crawled out of the impact crater

or at least my ghost

emerging from my bony, irradiated smithereens;

our chapters long since emptied out

all Uta Hagen, Siddhartha, and Roanoke

on the far side of closure

as if they’d filled a wastepaper basket,

its belly grumbling on three shreds of crumpled, loosed leaf

and the remainder a versicolor suffrage of stickier, more disgusting mutilations;

half an old Twinkie, a too ketchupped fork, a throat.

I think it would only hurt differently

than how you love me now

not more

differently as is the distinction between losing one’s sight and losing one’s eye.

Sometimes I need you to unlove me

in making a moment again when virtues came uncluttered and in a primal haste

when that old, electric touch

would stop you

and words were still a floodlight of promises

somewhere in that lush, ravishing precursor

when the aches of me had not yet become the pains of you,

before every atom was a disaster;

Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays marked on your calendar

to trumpet blame

drink a cheap coffee on-the-go

and leave the dirty lids where we keep the photo albums

letting them drool and spit onto the pinkest of our scars.

Tom thought to recapture his missing soul, though he couldn’t fathom how; a decade’s carefree insistence that a convivial relationship with his lounger, his warmest socks, and the pine frame containing his charcoal hydrangea, now proving less a delight than it was the expulsion of all living poetries within him.

I am a writer. That means I hang my agony on a turn of phrase. Take all night to write this sentence and I am a bad husband. Take all day to write this sentence; I’m a selfish son of a bitch. Massage the predicate for a week, neglectful father. Every syllable crammed between my imagined, gothic drop cap and this so very lonesome a period gets scribbled and replaced, arranged iamb, remade dactyl, then trashed. Delete, delete, delete. Come one month, I can be sure my mother will be the last soul who’ll see any good left in me. At eight I’m disowned. If I take a year to write this sentence, I am invisible to everyone but God, and I will have given him no reason to even glance at me. Twenty-five of those, fixated, and I become that committable type of crazy. I am a writer. I am older than you think. This is my death sentence.

Each inverted shot glass trembled as David’s eighth slammed down with the tensest punctuation yet. The parade of them made him feel as if he wasn’t inebriating alone. Uno had been for pain, his dos the opening that attempted to decode the human heart. But by eight he was beyond the broken ghosts in Jocelyn’s bed, convincing himself more each second that this queerest of cats must certainly work for the CIA, all while staring directly at his dog.

She was smart, that brand of intellect that reveals a lifetime of cross-referencing footnotes and trusting microfiche reels more than Google hits. That made it all the more a shame when, after fifteen years, Carla had yet to figure out how every scoop of scat from the litterbox spelled out “cut the blue wire” in hexadecimal.

All I said was, “We’re not going to the vet,” and it was like she knew I was lying.

The entire team of engineers failed to grasp her orders. After all, until such time as one was stupid enough to fill the heavens with too many ships, there really was no reason to construct a reverse setting. This was space. Yet the he viewscreen’s image of Paula Deen preparing a turducken explained what their captain could not. They were on it.

“People of Earth, we come in peace to Mars as you are batshit crazy at home.”

“Yeah. Uh, we’re gonna have to change the whole first contact rulebook from warp signature, to like, whenever the hell those Earth people resolve corporate personhood.”

FDA. We bring you unfiltered Camels to help waste you through the eye of that needle.

Hey kids! FaDA Bear says, “Drink up on potato vodka. It’ll sterilize whatever we missed.”

"Well, we used to be the Food and Dildo Administration, but then someone dipped a strap-on in hot sauce and ruined it for everybody."

"I can’t come in today, Barbara. My wife and I had a fight and she freed my comfort marlin."

"Sarge, you’re not just my superior officer, you’re my best friend. I got this. I ride shotgun in your squad car everyday, sometimes to hell and back. Just like that I’m going to be there, at arm’s length, proud, when you and Margo take that plunge, bind yourselves to each other and start a new life together. I got your back just like you’ve always had mine. But which is more important right now? The 10-89 on Waylon and Main that’s probably a hoax, or the very real possibility that some grizzly is gonna scoop up the very salmon that leapt out of the stream and swallowed the ring?"

"Oh yeah, it’s a thing. You know how you can’t scuba dive and fly in the same 24 hours? You can’t go surfcasting and collate in the same day. People’s wrists have been know to disintegrate."

Though brave enough to take down yesterday’s bison with just a leap and a bone knife, Stone Walker grew increasingly concerned about that which was hiding in the corner, especially as he lived in the tribe’s roundest teepee.

"Look, it’s either that one-eyed, mouth-foaming ratzilla, or your mother, and if it’s the latter I refuse to go after it."

To the human onlookers, it was a horrifying series of clicks and glottal stops amidst the shrill and shrieking din that came from the bigger one’s unhinged jaw. What they didn’t know was that this was simply Spreeklottle getting chewed out by his commander for not having read his rapid colonization handbook, an oversight evidenced by Chapter 7 “The Planet of Rectangular Houses,” and the bloody mess at the recruit’s feet proving that he’d tried to hide in the coroner.