Untitled Fiction Work in Progress (Excerpt)

When you boiled it down, no one had been there for me, at any point, in any real meaningful way. No mother, or wife, or brother, had ever stood up for me, ever supported me when it mattered or even when it didn’t, or ever really bothered to look at things from my perspective. I had always been on my own, but I never thought of it as anything but an honest truth—a lowered expectation that was both crippling and insignificant. Something unfortunate but natural. A birthmark of my generation. We were not hipsters, or beat nicks. We had no fresh optimism, and rebellion was just a cliché. Squeezed between the high-fructose capitalism of the 80’s, and the psychotropic drone of the 00’s, we matured. Lonely. Middle-classed straight through to our Pakistani-made boxer-briefs. Waiting for ourselves to arrive. Cigarette stealing, masturbating, video-gaming, bucket-dropping, and, eventually, blogging ourselves into a silent frenzy. Some of us smashed into lucrative but exhausting lawyering jobs, or careened into recursive acronyms of digital development. In one case, arrived in Hollywood to peddle alcoholic every-cops and Tic Tac smooth fruit-monikered computer systems. But never, in any instance, realizing what it was we all knew to be the case: we were better than this, than what we’d been told to expect and where we’d arrived. Our well-meaning, suburban parents’ white lies have become our champions. A shiftless, futile consumerism our only real past time. No longer sharing the spotlight with each other, competently mediocre, aging now, listless, sitting in Starbuck’s and watching our weight.