THE YELTSIN-CLINTON ERA, CENTRAL TIME ZONE<\/p>\n
The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one\u2019s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post-historical period, there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.<\/em><\/p>\n \u2014Francis Fukuyama<\/p>\n I saw her at the end of history, A Walmart of a decade, grunge CDs Never trust a hippie; punk was dead, another night. The party was a bore, Brown hair and gray-green eyes, high-cheekboned face, Gas was cheap. I used to drive all night Ambition needs a narrative, an arc I got the girl, or for a while at least. reveals the substrates, relics of a life GEN X STORIES<\/p>\n He used to be the bass guitarist for the classic hardcore band Die Capitalist Pig!!! and was on their seminal album, We All Fucked Your Girlfriend, Even the Bass Player<\/em>. Now he lives in Altadena, teaches memoir-writing at USC, and voted for Elizabeth Warren after considering Beto O\u2019Rourke and Pete Buttigeig. He also just blocked you for saying, quite truthfully, that the Clash weren\u2019t actually that good.<\/p>\n \u2014<\/p>\n When she was a girl, she had a Cabbage Patch Doll named after Sally Ride. In high school, she wasted two weeks of everyone\u2019s time because her English teacher alluded to the character of Shylock as an anti-Semitic trope, and she decided he was an anti-Semite. Even though most of the teaching staff and administration hated her afterwards, her essay on the matter got her into Bard. Now she works for a non-profit that specializes in teaching homeless children how to play Dixieland jazz. She also just blocked you because you called Tulsi Gabbard \u201cthicc\u201d to see what would happen.<\/p>\n \u2014<\/p>\n He came out of the closet as soon as it became clear that he wouldn\u2019t get written out of the will if he did. He owns three restaurants: Billy Bob\u2019s Shake-n-Bake (the one he inherited from his parents that actually makes money), a faux-dive called The Pink Flamingo (after the line in the Soft Cell song), and a Japanese-Italian fusion restaurant called The Meiji Risorgimento. He once beat a lawsuit from a disgruntled employee by successfully arguing that calling people \u201cbitches\u201d is part of his culture. He also just blocked you after you posted a link to an article about sweatshops making Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s clothing line.<\/p>\n \u2014<\/p>\n She was the Assistant Vice Treasurer in high school and was voted \u201cMost Likely to Narc on a Friend.\u201d She majored in art history at Vassar, did a law degree at Michigan, and married a regional manager for Chuck E. Cheese, who bought her an art gallery in order to have painters fuck her so he doesn\u2019t have to. She runs for local office as a Democrat as a hobby, losing by fifty more votes each time. She also just blocked you for calling her \u201cthe Amy Klobuchar of Ventura County.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014<\/p>\n He spent high school listening to Napalm Death and Cannibal Corpse and trying unsuccessfully to kick you in the genitals. Once, after taking several tabs of LSD, he joined the army and ended up doing a tour in Iraq. He got an honorable discharge, gained 300 pounds, and is the leading Facebook expert on how war crimes are actually good. He also just blocked you because… could have been anything, really.<\/p>\n \u2014<\/p>\n She was Native American in that Elizabeth Warren way, in that the only way you could know was if she told you\u2014a lot\u2014and you still had to take her word for it. Now, she lives in the worst suburb in your home state and produces children, revenue for chain restaurants, vaguely white nationalist online tirades, and second-hand lung cancer. She also just blocked you over the chain restaurants that she likes more than you do, of all the goddamn things.<\/p>\n \u2014<\/p>\n When he was a boy, he wanted to be president as soon as he ceased wanting to be a leopard or a cobra. After a school career spent listening to Classical music and doing an impression of an unusually ambitious Teddy Ruxspin, he settled for being a corporate attorney. His hobbies include playing the piano, collecting rare liqueurs from the former Soviet bloc, and tweeting about the #Resistance. He also just blocked you when you called his would-be Bond villain boss an asshole.<\/p>\n \u2014<\/p>\n She was always going to be a star and was not without a certain waifish charm, by which I mean she had a fondness for flowing dresses and singing in her thin, reedy voice to a tentatively strummed guitar until people hated her. Now she owns a cafe that she bought to save the open mic from the previous owner who thought it sucked. She also just blocked you when she remembered you called Tori Amos “white girl suicide music” twenty-five years ago.<\/p>\n \u2014<\/p>\n When he was a teenager, he was so violently and obsessively homophobic that everyone assumed he was secretly gay. Turns out he isn’t gay. He’s just a massively bigoted asshole. He also just blocked you because he was only in your timeline in the first place due to a misunderstanding.<\/p>\n \u2014<\/p>\n She used to have hours of dialogue memorized from every season of Northern Exposure<\/em>, even the one after Rob Morrow left. She was also heard to remark that she wished the world could be more like Edward Scissorhands. Now she makes Christian-themed videos for children on YouTube that feature her playing the glockenspiel. She also just blocked you for posting a parody of a Creed video.<\/p>\n \u2014<\/p>\n When someone told his class in high school that his generation would work harder than their parents for less remuneration and less job security, it gave him a boner, and he knew exactly why. Now he has exactly the job you think he would, precisely the ugly McMansion you think he’d live in, the kids with the exact godawful names you’d think they’d have, and the exact car with the precise bad gas mileage everyone suspected. He also just blocked you because he thought you were making fun of him when you cracked a joke about people who like Charlie Sheen.<\/p>\n \u2014<\/p>\n She does a reasonably good impression of being Michel Foucault\u2019s illegitimate daughter with Judith Butler. Her signature moves are using the word \u201cradical\u201d to modify every noun referring to her academic work and looking violently ill every time someone said \u201cdialectics.\u201d She\u2019s an adjunct professor at five schools, is shopping around seven articles and nine book manuscripts. She also just blocked you for being a socialist.<\/p>\n \u2014<\/p>\n His first big concert was Garth Brooks in 1990, and his belt buckles and pickup trucks have gotten bigger ever since. He has an MBA from the state university, lives in a four-bedroom home with unforgivably high ceilings, and manages a sporting goods store that mostly sells guns and fishing rods to fat people. He also just blocked you for being a coastal elite.<\/p>\n \u2014<\/p>\n She would have been beautiful had she spent less time on her appearance. These days, she sells houses to investors who think a Cheesecake Factory is the acme of gentrification. She\u2019s a church-council psycho who posts pictures of food she feels guilty about eating and which she blames for her ex-husband leaving her. She also just blocked you because you said her nickname in high school was \u201cThe Black Mamba.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014<\/p>\n He was the sort of guy you figured would end up designing elf-themed emojis, hosting a gardening show on a local NPR affiliate, becoming a serial killer, or some combination of the three. Instead, he has chartreuse dreadlocks, goes by DJ Kompound Fraxyoor, and is the seventh-most-popular purveyor of EDM on the Belgian club circuit. He also just blocked you for not realizing that \u201cyou have to be on ecstasy for it to sound good\u201d was intended as a compliment.<\/p>\n \u2014<\/p>\n In the eighth grade, she cried for two hours after she got mud on her Guess jeans during a wilderness excursion. Her first husband was a cop and her current husband is a white-collar criminal who’s an actuary on the side. She loves both her boys, who despite being seven and thirteen are already Large Adult Sons. She also just blocked you because you said that cheese was racist ironically, and she took it literally.<\/p>\n \u2014<\/p>\n He’s forty-five years old and still wears leather. Being the father of two children has had no discernible effect on his level of swearing. He’s a middle-class Ivy League leftist who distrusts people who went to elite schools. He’s an alternative rock snob who finds most first-wave punk rock unlistenable and goth rock funny. His hobbies are reading, writing, caffeine, vituperation, and hate. He hasn’t blocked you, but sometimes you wish he would.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Featured Image: Illustration shows a scene in the “Grand National Congressional Theatre” at the conclusion of the performance of “Fair Promise Combination No. 47 – Great Reform Bill – Act I Tarif Reform – Act II Civil Service Reform – Act III Internal Revenue Reform”. The audience is pelting the cast with cats, eggs, onions, turnips, and other vegetables and fruits. Among those on stage are David Davis, Thomas W. Ferry, George M. Robeson, Jay A. Hubbell, Frank Hiscock, Horace F. Page, William Mahone. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" THE YELTSIN-CLINTON ERA, CENTRAL TIME ZONE The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one\u2019s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":61,"featured_media":11793,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[1530,1531,3441,3639,3640,5423,7312,7341,7587,7588,7589,7590,7591,9349],"class_list":["post-11724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry","tag-central-time-zone","tag-central-time-zone-by-quincy-lehr","tag-francis-fukayama","tag-gen-x-stories","tag-gen-x-stories-quincy-lehr","tag-lehr","tag-poem-inspired-by-the-end-of-history","tag-poetry","tag-quincy","tag-quincy-lehr","tag-quincy-lehr-american-poet","tag-quincy-lehr-poet","tag-quincy-lehr-the-end-of-history","tag-the-yeltsin-clinton-era"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/61"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11724"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11724\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\na manic pixie dream-girl in black hat,
\na smile of adolescent irony
\nhanging like an imported cigarette,
\na denizen of corners. As she sat
\noff to the side, I stared. The smell of sweat,
\nDoritos, and the Oklahoma air,
\nsweet and allergenic, hit my nose.
\nI didn\u2019t sneeze and held a pensive pose.<\/p>\n
\nabout to hit the bargain bin, left stranded
\nlike hapless Soviet cosmonauts. The breeze
\nreminded us that time, like space, still moved.
\nThe Wall was down, the Eagle long since landed,
\nand we were told that nothing could be improved,
\nthat this was the teleology, the sum
\nof humankind\u2019s equation\u2014cue our laughter
\nat a life spent in the morning after.<\/p>\n
\nand there she was in her Doc Marten boots,
\nchin-length bangs and a partly shaven head,
\nand me with clothes and hair in mostly black
\n(the latter, though, showing some brown roots).
\nWith nothing up ahead, we both looked back
\nand somehow saw each other as we did.
\nIt\u2019s no way to travel, but neither was the way
\nmapped for us. Another summer day.<\/p>\n
\nthough everyone was there, and every room
\nechoed with conversations. You could score
\na few hours in your head if so inclined\u2014
\nan afternoon special tale of woe and doom,
\nerasers in the center of your mind,
\nor just a gakked-out evening passing time
\nwith tabs of LSD or skunk-schwag weed,
\nmushrooms, alcohol, or trucker speed.<\/p>\n
\ninsomniac intelligence\u2014a joke
\nshe told herself running in a race
\nbetween the shimmers of her glance and lips.
\nI sneered, though fuck knows why, and lit a smoke,
\narrogant from lungs to fingertips,
\nthe dumbest smart guy in the room, but still
\nshe followed me outside. Cue the blurred
\nmemories of teenaged passions stirred.<\/p>\n
\nlooking for crowds I knew would be at home.
\nNothing was going on. Cosmic spite?
\nA scene commodified and then discarded
\nlike cardboard boxes, plastic, styrofoam
\nthe day after Christmas? I wasn\u2019t broken-hearted,
\nso much as empty as a city street
\non Sunday night with everything closed down,
\ncounting the days till I got out of town.<\/p>\n
\n\u2014rising action, climax, denouement\u2014
\nand what we had was groping in the dark
\nalong with books we partly understood,
\ndiscussed across a coffee and croissant
\nsome mornings. Good enough, if not quite good.
\nUnderstanding is the bonus point,
\nexperience itself the pass and fail,
\nthe revolution, Jonah and the whale.<\/p>\n
\nMazel tov. Yippee yi cy yay.
\nBehold the bread and theorize the yeast,
\nbut know that when you eat it, that\u2019s the end.
\nRide into the sunset. What the hey.
\nHistory wasn\u2019t over, that pretend
\nconceit was soon demolished. We were, too.
\nI wouldn\u2019t say I miss her. The debris
\nremains beneath, and archeology<\/p>\n
\nrebuilt on top of ruins. As I drive
\nthrough a different city, kids and wife
\nawait me as the radio plays a song
\nI barely liked but heard back then, alive
\nbut not like this, when summers seemed so long,
\nwhen love was hard, and love was what we had.
\nI change the station, hum a melody
\nthat sings out past the end of history.<\/p>\n
\nTitle from item.
\nIllus. from Puck, v. 12, no. 312, (1883 February 28), centerfold.
\nCopyright 1883 by Keppler & Schwarzmann.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n