taken from generation x
“Now, Martin, like most embittered ex-hippies, is a yuppie, and i have no idea how you’re suppose to relate to those people. And before you start getting shrill and saying yuppies don’t exist, let’s just face facts: they do. Dickoids like Martin who snap like wolverines on speed when they can’t have a restaurant’s window seat in the nonsmoking section with cloth napkins. Androids who never get jokes and who have something scared and mean at the core of their existence, like an under-fed chihuahua baring its teeny fangs and waiting to have its face kicked in or like a glass of milk sloshed on top of the violet filaments of a bug barbeque: weird abuse of nature. Yuppies never gamble, they calculate. They have no aura: ever been to a yuppie party? It’s like being in an empty room: empty hologram people walking around peeking at themselves in mirrors and surreptitiously misting their tonsils with Binaca spray, just in case they have to kiss another ghost like themselves. There’s just nothing there.
“So, ‘Hey Martin,’ I asked when I go to his office, a plush James Bond number overlooking the downtown core–he’s sitting there wearing a computer-generated purple sweater from Korea–a sweater with lots of texture. Martin likes texture. ‘Put yourself in my shoes. Do you really think we enjoy having to work in that toxic waste dump in there?’
“Uncontrollable urges were overtaking me.
“‘…and then have to watch you chat with your yuppie buddies about your gut liposuction all day while you secrete artificially sweetened royal jelly here in Xanadu?’
“Suddenly I was into this tres deeply. Well, if I’m going to quit anyway, might as well get a thing or two off my chest.
” ‘I beg your pardon,’ says Martin, the wind taken out of his sails.
” ‘Or for that matter, do you really think we enjoy hearing about your brand new million-dollar home when we can barely afford to eat Kraft Dinner sandwiches in our own grimy little shoe boxes and we’re pushing thirty? A home you won in a genetic lottery, I might add, sheerly by dint of your having been born at the right time in history? You’d last about ten minutes if you were my age these days, Martin. And I have to endure pinheads like you rusting above me for the rest of my life, always grabbing the best piece of cake first and then putting a barbed-wire fence around the rest. You really make me sick.’
“Unfortunately the phone rang then, so I missed what would have undoubtedly been a feeble retort…some higher-up Martin was in the middle of a bum-kissing campaign with and who couldn’t be shaken off the line. I dawdled off into the staff cafeteria. There, a salesman from the copy machine company was pouring a Styrofoam cup full of scalding hot coffee into the soil around a ficus tree which really hadn’t even recovered yet from having been fed cocktails and cigarette butts from the Christmas party. It was pissing rain outside, and the water was drizzling down the windows, but inside the air was as dry as the Sahara from being recirculated. The staff were all bitching about commuting time and making AIDS jokes, labeling the office’s fashion victims, sneezing, discussing their horoscopes, planning their time-shares in Santo Domingo, and slagging the rich and famous. I felt cynical and the room matched my mood.
