December 20th –
Last night there was a pre-christmas party cocktail of Smirnoff vodka at house number 75. Five young adults sitting on the floor, around the coffee table talking of anything and catching up with each other in life. The gathering was rather informal and it consisted of a new breed of friends spawned by the dawn of online chatting. We were also the generation whom people thought to belong to the X – loners, cynics, slackers, bohemians, children of the middle class overworked parents; grew up listening to Nirvana and Lisa Loeb, bursting with artistic talents and bigger dreams which we were told only worth dreaming; smelling like teen spirits but acting as if jaded as the world turned, too engrossed with the 80’s consumerism and progress that they forgot about their angry little alienated teenagers who decidedly shunned everything from authority to religion to parental love in pursuit of anything pop, cult or taboo.
Last night the generation formerly known as X congregated, commenced conversations concerning consumerism and advancement. Every one of us came from small-minded towns to occupy what space they have in the metropolitan; daring to shift mindlessly through the white-collared masses, ravenous for independence and promotions; still angry at the world except that we learned to give in a little because all that rant-and-raves will forever be unheard anyway. No matter where the wind has blown to, the one angry phase of our life feels as if easily ignored. It could be because we were trapped in the opulence of city living; The slum of dirt, the noise, the carbon monoxides begs us to dispose what’s more than our disposable income so we can exist alongside it, drenched in designer perfumes and dry-cleaned clothes – looking like a million dollars rather than having it.
All the angst must’ve evaporated steadily with the morning dew at the dawn of each monday as the garbage truck carry our weekly dump outside the electric gate. The antagonized youth that once were dirty and jaded now excited over jazz, bossa nova, pop-exercises, exfoliation, PDAs and PS2s; stares in awe and (almost in) silent jealousy at the present-day pre-teens whose oversized hip-hop pants are stuffed with wi-fi PDA-camera-phone that has everything digital in it except condoms for safe sex. Back then mobile phones were luxury items the size of a briefcase with its weight almost equal to its price in kilogram. Back then, we passed our time playing spirits-of-the-coins, smashing light bulb filaments with an expired credit-card to sniff it from a line like cocaine, scraping the threads of our brand new 501s with a smooth coral or a penknife to achieve that DavidLeeRoth wash effect, playing post-office in the closet with our cousins discovering the wetness down there that came with the experimental kissing and basically just being children which scared the living daylight out of our stressed out mothers. And for all that we were whipped for our insolence and curious creativity; feel the sting from our father’s three inches thick leather belt or the very long pencil-thin rattan on our scrawny mosquito bitten legs leaving scars which will be the very source of gossips in school by monday morning assembly.
Our pleas were never heard as we bitterly anticipate the crack of the whip with nowhere to run, not even to grandma whose reprimands always powerless with matters at hand. When restless creativity turned to magazine-cutting collages, by then there were also some with guitar pick in our two ringgit plastic wallet, music was an escape from the thing called The Parent. The trained interest in piano scales diminished as soon as the guitar is picked. The generation X grew restless, stunted without imaginations and restricted in activities.
Reading was progressively encouraged but when you say you want to study Shakespeare at college, your choice was never a priority, in fact it was a joke; both as in ha-ha-hee-hee kind of joke and as in you’re-kidding, right?-kind of joke. Reading to the parents are things to while your time not to digest insinuations, propagandas or whatsoever twisted morality that came with it. Reading was for leisure and if anything is to be gained from it, then read the New Testament! Bring on the belt and the children of the flower power generation would automatically cower under their bony arm, palms spread out over their head – petrified! grasping to realize the definition of terror, torn between respect for the elders and hatred of the same. Cries punctuated by uncontrolled gasp rings right through the wooden wall, terrified of excruciating pain biting into the tender skin, too shocked to even recall the source of outrage and the parents wonder why their offspring grow up screwed up.
December 21st – another eclectic group of five congregated for the Christmas Party; conversations spiraled from stories of yester year. Talks of life in Melbourne, meeting the strangest most quirkiest individuals positively confident in dress and sense, sitting on the roof singing and drinking. The topic shifts to subjective conversations of the power of sex and sexuality, legalized prostitution and marijuana, tripping on acid or speed, commercially accepted body arts and piercing that once were taboos, complaints of small town mentality, spirits and spirituality, the Japanese, the Love Hotels and Tokyo, Kill Bill, Baise Moi, Bob Dylan and David Bowie. There was so much to learn about the other and so much was learned.
The generation that once were X sat around sharing cheap rolled up weed recall so much of the years that was the greatest time in our life. The angry children who had embarked on a soul searching expedition, stumbling upon newer and more dangerous ways to live, seeming reckless to the older more responsible voting public; we pick up from experiences, discovering the pathetic effects of ecstasy, willed by curiosity to try cute little acid-dipped papers only to know not to try it again. This is the generation self-educated in birth-control contraptions because we try so hard to teach ourselves what we were never allowed to learn in school.
How will anyone know if marijuana is no good if all the stories they heard about is from the government? How will anyone know the pleasure or distaste of homosexual sex, if they don’t try it? How will anyone know if Catholicism is so good if they’re told not to read about The Virgin Queen or the Spanish Inquisition? If its better to be safe than sorry; then being safe all your life will not make a bestselling memoir – your life would be set in a monotony of trivial gossips, unchanged melodies and undiscovered potentials droned in the unglamorous sea of beige and sepias and that is painful living to me.
The generation that once were X is already taking over your job as a senior sales manager or tinkering around with vintage 1982 Chateau Lafitte; pushing you over the edge with an already banned documentary on pig-farming or shouting orders and gaining more respect than the Chef-de-partie. The asian generation that once were X realize the power of insolent-learning, gained understanding through experience rather than through their imbecile high school teachers who use their government controlled textbook knowledge and power to shut you up from asking questions about things they never knew answers to. The generation that once were X is now talking of consumerism like the way it was and everything will fall into place because we know. We just know that once upon a time ago we dreamt of bigger things, mocked and ridiculed for not realizing reality but in truth, it is us who mould and materialize our dreams in our comfortable but progressing pace, affluent in our adopted arrogance and constantly pushing to find new things while the colorless masses shift through their grey world, encased in their safely safe world unconscious of the beauty of living.
