A Millennial Revenge Fantasy
Welcome to the millennial revenge bunker. Here, in this dead-mall-turned-torture-chamber, there is only one master, and it is all of us, equally. Bow before our UGG boots and prepare to sip the calcified piss of a fellow old from one of our myriad trophies. Dodo fuckboys, it’s time to get humble. To spell out the law of the land in the dead language of your time: on a Letterman Top Ten list of this situation, we are all number one, and you are numbers two through ten. The fleek have inherited the earth.
We begin by playing a podcast of your transgressions:
1) Subprime lending, 2) Large scale environmental destruction, 3) Codifying and enshrining an insidious form of systemic racism, 4) Using up all the Quaaludes, 5) Selfie Shaming, 6) Buying us off-brand Sleek Skoots when we explicitly asked for Razor scooters (pause for SquareSpace promo), 7) Factory farming, 8) Saying you are cool with gay people as long as you don’t have to see them, 9) Tori Amos nostalgia, 10) Being raisiny skin-sacks of irrelevance.
We have brought you here to do penance for your sins.
Your torture will begin each morning with a hearty bowl of print magazines and crude oil. Eat standing up like the sticks-in-the-mud that you are, for laziness is ours now. You bestowed it upon us alongside crumbling public transit infrastructure and deindustrialized urban centers. No coffee.
At 10a.m. you will engage in physical fitness in the food court. The Presidential Fitness Test is a program designed to instill America’s youth with lifelong exercise habits. You only live once (#YOLO) so get moving. Sit and reach for the unattainable delusion of a financially-secure future. May the dull tone of the PACER ring in your ears until it is finally confirmed that nary a child has been left behind.
No lunch. You refused to buy us Lunchables, and now you must pay. Grab a seat at a standing desk because this afternoon you work an unpaid internship in dubstep. When the beat drops, admit that it is no longer feasible to put oneself through college working a part-time minimum-wage job. In the millennial revenge bunker, we can’t hear you scream over 23 years of earbud-induced tinnitus.
In the afternoon, there is an IRL Spotify, or as you might have called it in your day, a “record hop.” The playlist is as follows: Ke$ha covers of Wilco, nothing else. There will be no mixed gender couples, as heterosexuality is now obsolete. You may choose to gay-marry another old, or you may twerk alongside this effigy of Reagan.
Dinner was going to be a heaping bowl of French Toast Crunch, but you discontinued it. Instead, you will satisfy yourself by reliving every moment of your stable 35-year career at a single job. Dessert will not be a hefty pension and a Rolex, nor will it be crunchy M&M;’s, for you discontinued those too.
Before bed, you will walk across a hot bed of MacBook chargers while texting. You will text using one hand (thumb only!), and if you collide with another old you must immediately take the blame and confess to being self-centered, inconsiderate, and lazy. As you walk through this Valley of the Shadow of Death, the only rod or staff that will comfort you is the sharp sting of a Selfie Stick against the backs of your thighs.
Do not attempt to bribe your way out of this novel hell with your handsome pile of social security riches. Shove them up your ass, we might say, if assplay wasn’t exclusively ours now. After abstinence-only sex ed ruined vaginal intercourse, we headed west towards the frontier and found a hole to call our own. Besides, we only accept bribes using Venmo. None of us have checkbooks.
Jamie Lauren Keiles is the last enthusiastic person in New York.