Scott Kraus

I may not be the best person to describe my generation. To describe a generation, you have to have some impossible viewpoint where you are both wholly participatory and high up, observing the whole mess from a point removed. On both of these counts, I fall short.

Even so I’ll attempt it, because I feel something. Some form of mutation. Some form of guilt.

I’m among those millenials born in the early nineties who saw with each year incredible advances, who were told early and often that they were coming into a truly noble inheritance, those of us who were given the ball only either to fumble it or have it ripped away, those of us who somehow made it to the next pedestal but still cry that it is not enough. I’m among those who are all in some way guilty.

Before I go further, I don’t want to disparage myself or my cohort, although it may sound that way. It isn’t out of stockholm syndrome that I love my peers. But it also isn’t love that we lack. Love just might be the one resource we have in abundance, and if it was capable of being oversupplied, we have certainly found that threshold. It is love that showed us tolerance, that showed us our optimism in our capabilities and our humor in our defeats. No, we are a lovely bunch. Something else is troubling me.

One hundred years prior to the day I write this was 1923, nearly four years removed from World War I and well into a sort of aimless prosperity that typified the jazz age. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that all the nervous energy left unexpended from the war found its footing in the excesses of that time. We have a sort of nervous energy too, but it’s of a different sort. If history is supposed to rhyme, I think the line we’re hitting now is a broken one.

Maybe our partner line from the century prior was the break, the first world war being the industrialization of death. Or maybe the break was here with us today, in our pockets.

It might be weird to compare smartphones with one of the most brutal wars in our modern age, but then again, I’m talking about my generation and the things that shaped us. When we were children, phones hung on the wall. By the time we were adults, they were with us everywhere. Our first kiss was concurrent with our first text message. We are the fish that grew legs and breathed air. We are attached to our phones, through more than just use and habit. We developed with them. They are a part of us. We are the first cyborgs.

Sometimes I leave my phone at home on purpose. I wander the streets without it. I feel the nakedness and the strange liberation that I don’t think any creature on earth has felt before, that of leaving a part of yourself behind, safely, secured somewhere where you can find it again as you left it. Perhaps with more charge.

With that said, phones don’t trouble me. Give a person a new technology and they will use it. I met my fiance this way. There is as much guilt in adopting the technology of our time as there is giving a baby a toy and them playing with it.

But there is a guilt to being a millenial. It’s obvious in our memes: the almost constant resharing and reassuring of each other to take care of ourselves, now shortened to self-care, or to reexamine ourselves and our biases and to study our individual place in society in some greater context, social justice – then also to take personal responsibility for the impact that even our most minute facial expressions make on others, the impact our presence in a room makes, mindfulness.

By default, I feel culpable of something. But I don’t think what we specifically are culpable of has been voiced yet. Or it has and we haven’t been paying attention, or maybe I haven’t been paying attention. Maybe this guilt I place on my age and my peers stands in for a more ready explanation from my own life – a feeling of waste.

I have wasted my youth, but then again I’m told I still live it though I am in my thirties. I have wasted my potential which at one point told me I could conquer the world or at least a part of it. I have wasted my friendships and my connection to family by remaining in my room, in my mind, in some other-world that never existed even as it entranced me. I have wasted money on subscriptions I keep forgetting to cancel and taxes to a government I don’t believe in and by not trusting store brand merchandise to do the same job as things from commercials. I have wasted my time writing this and your time reading this.

This sense of guilt, that I feel comes from outside, rather than in, comes from a sense of waste, and a sense of waste comes from something that could have been wasted. A gift, squandered.

But maybe it wasn’t squandered, but rather spent. Or simply gone. The idea that something has left and the hubris that it was my actions that sent it away, rather than simply time passing.

The world has changed in innumerable ways for everyone and for people of my age we can’t help but feel it is changing as we do. Our twenties are gone and youth’s invulnerability with it. Some of us who wanted a family feel they won’t be able to have one. There was once something bright and shining just ahead of us that has burned out.

So we blame ourselves. We blame our actions, and not just the deliberate ones but the accidental ones. We blame the chances we took and everything we have won and loss. We blame the people who came before us, and who came with us. We blame those that never existed. And we carry this guilt in the same place we carried our spirit not so long ago.

There is no exorcising this guilt in the same way there is no prosecuting it. But let me say this: a guilt that can’t be forgiven or condemned can’t live long. The years will pass and we will see the next generation struggle too. Our stories will be different, but they’ll end the same way. With time.

The heart asks more than life can give – from Moonlight by Sara Teasdale

Let me list a few things, do they resonate with you?

• A riverboat on a clear night with yellowlit windows
• The moment you first recognize a voice from outside while approaching a party
• The taste in the air the first morning after everything had changed…

I have been obsessed with this specific feeling for as long as I can remember. The older I get, the more I notice the patina, like looking at an antique that has no practical use any more. At some moment in my life, I could swear I felt it for the first time and it was new.

It’s unnameable as far as I can tell, this feeling, but I constantly see people writing around it, like we’re all circling something ineffable.

A couple more things that may resonate…

• When you hear a good cover of a song you’ve forgotten
• When a melody makes you tear up before the words make sense

Music seems to be the closest way we can approximate this feeling. I remember being in New York City for the first time and hearing a choir and orchestra play a famous Christmas song, but they played it in such a way that I never heard or felt the same way again, but I can bring it out from the archives of my mind and play not just the sounds but the feeling that crawled up my spine and lifted my eyes to the sky, something akin to worship, but without an object of worship, an ejaculation of spirit into the void.

A strange, snickering way to put it…but accurate.

If the human condition is one of reaching for something glorious then maybe the feeling I’m obsessed with is the space between the reaching and the glory.

They say music is about the space between the notes as much as the notes themselves.

When I was in Buenos Aires, I felt like almost every moment was some kind of waiting. I was waiting for this to happen, or that. I would get bored at times and I would get impatient.

Looking back I don’t remember any of the waiting, or what it was like to wait. I remember the little things I did to break it up, but only like noise in a greater picture of the things I remember with vivid clarity, moments I can bring to mind in full resolution. I can remember seeing Julia’s face for the first time, but I don’t remember ducking into the back of the car she hired, though I do remember my knee bumping into hers on the drive into the city. I can point to the spot on my knee. If there was a way to prove it I bet I would be accurate within half an inch.

I’m trying to write a novel about this feeling I hardly understand. Aspects of it come to me clearly when I’m about my normal weekday routine. Things come to me best when a certain level of loneliness creeps in. When I’m not talking.

Ultimately I think all feelings precede thought, that thought is just a bantering language over something incredible. A steel case or a suit of armor. I don’t expect anything from my writing – certainly not a career or social acclaim and if not for Jason Storms I wouldn’t even expect a reader. But I write a lot anyway. If I can get closer to the core of whatever it is to be, it’s all I need.

I wake up without an alarm to a quiet house. After a good sleep I perceive things clearly enough to notice them. At night I’m so distracted by my own mind that it’s all I can hear but in the morning I can hear the fridge humming and tires sloshing on the interstate a half mile away. I make coffee, go to the bathroom, then pour a cup and sit on my couch where I work. In this way I think of all the things I need to do that day and it doesn’t worry me yet because I still have the day. Here I make a list. I order it so all I have to do to keep going is look at the top of the list. It’s very important to keep going.

I know two types of people: people who dream, and people who see.

Dreamers live in their heads. They live in the hope words inspire. Language to them isn’t a tool, but magic. Imagine an artist or a lying politician. Imagine anyone who speaks things into existence. Dreamers look out to the horizon and see possibility, and feel restless.

Seers live within their arm’s reach. Their world is one of touch and fog. They like to call themselves realists, but their reality is only what they can grapple with. They have loyalty and compassion, but only for those they can touch. Seers look out to the horizon and see God, and feel fear.

Most people bounce between the two modes, but there is always a primary mode.

I know people who are clearly dreamers, but because decades of their lives were spent in fruitless moments of miscommunication, they become like seers. They live in fear of the horizon they chased. They become aware that ambition, hope, desire, and longing are all functions of distance, that closing the distance only reveals another distance, and like Heraclites they realize the world is only ever what it is now, despite our flowing through it.

It is more rare for seers to become dreamers. When you close your eyes to possibility, you close your eyes to change. The walls you build around you trap you. Eventually these walls crumble and seers are left with a blank horizon and the face of God rising over it. They can only imagine that this is a cruel thing, and so their dreams are nightmares.

When you speak in dichotomies, the reflex is to imagine a middle way. It’s soothing to describe the world in extremes, and to then console yourself that you are a true mix, that you are multitudes. And we all are, of course, in our own ways. But I see too much of the extremes to believe this.

In the course of my short, secluded life (am I a dreamer or a seer?), my closest friends have been poets and businessmen, soldiers and protesters. The people I love are all caring, and they are all completely certain that their view is clear from their vantage. I am certain too in my view, though I feel wrong in saying it.

I haven’t suffered enough to understand reality, and somehow this is apparent whenever I talk at length about anything. I wouldn’t trade my life for another’s, and this is supposed to mean something. It turns out the basis for self-satisfaction is opting not to be in a body-switch comedy, though this was never in the cards.

No matter how far you chase the horizon, it is still there. No matter how tall you build the wall, there it is, the horizon looming up ahead. It is so constant that I’ve begun defining the horizon not as the curved line of the earth, but the space under my own feet, always slipping further away.

I’m in my thirties. This means I won’t age again until I’m in my forties.

Meanwhile, I get to enjoy the finer things in life with newfound sophistication. No longer am I harried by carpe diem, the Latin equivalent of YOLO. No longer am I expected to chain-drink shots to start a party. Shots are now for the end of the party: this way I can fall asleep quicker.

And nothing is really a party anymore. It’s just called a night. “What are you doing Friday night,” they ask. The same thing I do Tuesday night, invariably, but maybe with vigor. Either way I’ll be up tomorrow morning at the same time. This is called a routine.

I like my routine. I like my mornings and nights. Days come and go but they’re surrounded by these immoveable slabs of behavior that occur without the use of willpower. I like that.

Willpower is a polite way to refer to the indignity of doing something you don’t want to do. You can see willpower become indignity if you wear it down. It’s like the pyramids of Egypt, their marble veneer now worn down by erosion, leaving exposed a long-suffering limestone structure.

I imagine this is inevitable, but I still have some willpower left, thanks to my routine. I wake up and somehow my legs know to cart my body to the bathroom. Somehow, after this, my hands know to start some coffee. Before I realize it, I’m at a desk and an email has been sent off.

From this point, now well prepared, a day happens. This is the variable aspect of life. The big movie. Who knows how long it’ll be, or what travails I’ll face, but I will know it has ended when my night routine kicks in. Here, I mentally note a list of people whom it is too late to send a meme to. I look in my pantry for something that won’t bubble all night in my stomach. I’ve had enough dreams about losing teeth that brushing, flossing, and listerine all occur without my expressed consent.

I imagine as I get older these bookends will gradually gain territory. The morning routine will get an addition that takes me far past noon, while my night routine will kick in before dinner is decided.

Eventually, I’ll have perfected my full day, and any aberration to this fine-tuned construct will present as injustice. How dare you barge in at two in the afternoon? This is story time. How do you expect me to come to your dinner party at eight on a Wednesday? And how did the word ‘party’ come back in the lexicon?

But, I’m not quite there yet. I’m in my thirties, as I said. A good portion of my day is variable, chaotic even. The routines I’ve developed are still feeble, yet to be nursed into their full form. And why would I want that yet? After all, I still got a bit of marble on me.

The first road-sticking snow fell last night. Every year this happens, I wake up, lumber about my morning, and inevitably open a window-blind to dazzlingly offensive light. I rub my eyes and marvel at its softness. I mourn fall, an always too short season. I think about Dubliners, a book that ends in snow falling general all over the living and the dead.

It’s one of those days where everybody posts the same things on social media. If you commute, you’ll complain that people can’t drive. If you stayed in, you’ll post a photo of the snow through the same window that dazzled you. If you don’t do either, you’ll check social media and notice how everyone posts the same thing. You might feel pride or superiority for not posting anything about snow, and you might try to exercise your wit with a post about how everyone is posting about snow. You’ll be driven to remark, even if you don’t care to.

When I go out today, which I am blessed to only have to sparingly, I know I will have a conversation about not being ready for snow. Talking about the weather is as natural as dogs barking at strangers; no season announces itself harder for conversation fodder than winter on arrival.

I just paid ten bucks for a state park pass on my license plate. My cat still begs for me to open the window for him to enjoy fresh air. Are my tires even winter ready? You can call the snow pretty as long as you add ‘but not for long.’

For my part, I uploaded a video to the Stories feature on Instagram of my cat Kyle looking outside. I believe Instagram added a comedic brass stab denoting surprise, which Kyle only mildly expressed in truth. Then I thought about taking some online classes this winter, drinking warm beverages. Then I wrote this.