Why Larry King Sucks

I wrote a letter to Larry King on this website. I hope he reads it! Or, I hope his assistant reads it to him. Read more!

Why Internet Porn Sucks

Here's a link to a letter I wrote to online pornography. One of many money shots that are included in it:

Oh, she’s sucking his dick? That’s nice, I guess, even though he’s having kind of a hard time keeping it up, probably because he did a bunch of coke before they started shooting. How long does this go on for? Jesus, five whole minutes of this monotonous dick-sucking? Now what? Oh, she’s gotten on top of him—great, a long shot of her rubbery labia bouncing up and down on his smooth balls without the distraction of being able to see either of their faces. Yeah, this is hot.

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Why Being Sick When You Are an Adult Sucks

You wake up and feel like shit. Which is actually not headline news, because you were out drinking last night, which you do a lot, and when you aren’t out drinking you’re in drinking, but this shit you’re feeling is worse than that usual dryness-on-the-inside-of-your-body ache. You throat is scraped raw, like sometime during the night you stuck a rusty spoon down it, and your headache is an unusually hot and heavy one. Your whole forehead feels like an oddly throbbing bruise. If only scientists could harness the power of your headache, the country’s carbon usage would fall by whole percentage points.

Now, are you actually sick? You haven’t puked, although your stomach is making a fist. You get out of bed. Jesus, you’re shivering uncontrollably, it’s fucking freezing and you start this horrible coughing that is really alarming—time to call in to work sick.

When you were a kid, you savored that moment when your parental figure finally gave in and was like, “Alright, I guess you’ll have to stay home,” making your heart surge. Stay home! All right! Except now you are your own parental unit and you actually want to go to work. Or not “want,” exactly, but if you’re working a shit per-hour job you need that money you won’t earn in your bed or contorted over your uncleaned-in-weeks toilet gagging; and if you have a job with some responsibility that pays you a salary, well, you better get well enough to stumble to your laptop and answer some emails or there will be a mess waiting for you when you get back.

Also, remember those childhood sickdays when your parental unit—unsexed here because we don’t want to offend anyone whose father was the primary caregiver and nurturer, but we’re talking about an essentially maternal figure—would take the day off work, if he or she worked, and just hover around you giving you cough syrup and water and tea and toast lightly drizzled with honey and chicken noodle soup and whatever else you felt you could consume without heaving green bile into a pot that the primary caregiver was thoughtful enough to place at your bedside? Remember when you were asked, “What do you need, honey? Do you need anything?” That was the best part of being sick, and the best part of having parents, actually, is that sense of having someone who cares about your desires, who will ask you what you need and be sincere and even be willing to go out of her way to physically provide the thing whose absence has left a hole in your preadolescent heart, unless this thing is something impossible like a helicopter or something that you really don’t need, like a ferret or a box of chemically flavored fudge or another fucking video game system. What is life, once you’ve become taller than your parents and wandered afield, other than a search for someone who will once again ask you, “What do you need?” and mean it?

Well, anyway, you could sure use someone asking you those questions, but your roommates are gone doing whatever it is they do during the day and your fridge and cabinets are not exactly stocked with cans of nurturing soup and cold medication and herbal remedies. This reminds you that you live the kind of life where you basically have half a six pack, some mustard, bacon, and a few half-eaten vegetables in your fridge and not much else, and maybe you really should try to be healthier, or at least better prepared. But that’s for later. Now, you should get some supplies for being sick, which gets at the crux of what it’s like to be sick and on your own.

Are you going to go to the store? You can’t really drive, what with these shivers and this fever, and you aren’t going to get on a fucking bus in this condition, so you better hope the hypothetical second person tense this is about lives in a metro area in walking distance of a corner store or pharmacy. And then you have to carry the stuff home yourself, trembling in the suddenly-freezing weather, coughing with your entire body on the street like one of those homeless guys on his really depressing last legs, and you have to heat the soup up yourself, when what you really need to do is lie down in the bed that no one is making for you. You give up on soup. You drink tap water, lots of tap water, and then try juice but it makes you nearly vomit. Juice later then. You scarf aspirin down, feel your forehead, the stupidity of taking your own temperature. The afternoon light outside your window goes gray and then fades. You’re pretty sure you won’t puke now.

When you’re sick you can’t entertain yourself by surfing the internet—too much effort—and you can only read if you’re really dedicated to the book and your head doesn’t start throbbing. You can maybe manage a movie, half watching it and half sort of trying to sleep, but it has to be something stupid, the kind of movie you usually hate, and you hate it now, watching it—being sick doesn’t make you dumber. Do you try to masturbate? Masturbating when you’re sick, when you have the chills and are coated in a thin layer of dried sweat and your head is pounding, is terrible, it’s like trying to have sex while your sick, as if anyone would let you do that, and you can only bring yourself to orgasm if you try way too hard for way to long, and it isn’t even any good and you feel fucking disgusting afterwards. Don’t masturbate when you’re feeling sick. Just lie there, doing that kind of moaning thing you did when you were sick and home along, where you make a sustained noise with your mouth that combines the vibration of a vibrating phone with the sustained low-pitch whine of a circular saw. It sounds like a robot dying but you feel better when you do it, somehow, like a sonic security blanket, although you couldn’t do it when your parental unit was home because, you learned the hard way, they would get pretty alarmed that their child would make a noise like that for an extended period of time.

If you are sick for more than one day, you wonder if you will die of your illness. This is ignorant and self-centered, but it happens. Isn’t there a chance that you have something really serious masquerading as a flu? It could be like an episode of House where the patient of the week thinks she’s just sick, but she’s been sick for a month and her concerned loving husband (secretly a gambling addict, we learn in a side plot!) takes her in and House’s team solves her problem easily and is ready to discharge her but then she starts anally bleeding and has this horrible rash on her arm, oh god, and her eyes are slowly filling with blood while the white-coated doctors banter about how it can’t be that one obscure disease because otherwise she would have no sense of smell, and there’s a tearful scene with her gambling-addict husband and she is like, “Am I going to die? They won’t tell me,” and he goes “Yes, and I’m not going to tell you about my gambling addiction because I love you so much, more than baccarat, and I want to spare you pain in your final moments,” and things are looking really bad until House himself, as the result of a side plot where he has taken up recreational hatchet-throwing as a way to bond with Cuddy, solves the mystery of the patient’s anal bleeding and nearly kills someone with a hatchet in his haste to administer the exact right medication to the patient, who, you have to wonder at the end, is still not in the best place because she still doesn’t know that the husband lost the mortgage in one white-knuckled night of high-stakes blackjack.

Well, this will not happen to you, thankfully. You will just gradually get better until you just have a cold and you won’t drink for a while and then you will be drinking again and you will learn nothing from this, your kitchen will still just have a bunch of shitty junk food in it that a sick person could not eat.

But while you wait to get better, you still have to stand in front of your stove cooking scrambled eggs—the thought of more complex foods makes your stomach clench in protest—in your bathrobe, which is inside out because who gives a fuck? and your t-shirt that is your least favorite t-shirt because it has about 20 tiny holes in it, and you are blowing your nose into your t-shirt because there aren’t any Kleenex in reach and you are like, man, I must have done something wrong for this to happen to me. At least when you’re hungover, there’s a reason for it. Read more!

Abe Sauer's Great Piece on Why Christian Aid in Haiti Sucks

I don’t read everything that appears on the internet, but surely Abe Sauer’s long, exhaustively-researched hit piece on Christian aid groups in Haiti illegally using government money from USAID to proselytize to the voodoo-practicing Haitians before giving them aid was just about the best thing that flashed across anyone’s monitor last week. The law states that the US government can give money to Christian groups as long as they in turn spend that money caring for the needy and don’t thrust Bibles into native hands at the same time they, the Christian groups, are bandaging up those hands. Because, y’know, if the US formally funded groups devoted spreading evangelical Christianity in the third world it would violate the Constitution in a pretty direct way.

I don’t have anything really to say about the piece itself, other than you should go read it, right now, the whole thing, but I will say that whenever the religious right (and the organizations mentioned in this article are undoubtedly right-wing; they have Sarah Palin’s support and some are overseen by the Graham family) gets the government to bend backwards to appease their agenda, I get visibly angry. Not at the Christians, necessarily, but at the atheists, agnostics, and others that generally oppose the Christians’ goals but aren’t motivated or organized enough to stop them.

Look, I know the United States is a Christian nation--not “founded on Christian principles,” but clearly, dominated demographically by Christians. Furthermore, a lot of these Christians have no problem just standing up and yelling, “Stop teaching my children evolution!” or “Put the Ten Commandments outside of this motherfucking courthouse!” (They don’t say “motherfucking,” but the tone is close enough.) A lot of people who disagree with these statements—which are fucking insane, by the way—are more or less happy to ignore the Christians, or laugh them off, and basically go about their merry, non-spiritual business as organisms.

The problem with this is that the Christians win this way. As an atheist, I’m having more and more of a problem with that.

For years, I didn’t want to argue with any Christians, or be vocal about my non-belief. Because no one wants to listen to that smug asshole atheist yammering about the inconsistencies in the Bible and treating Christians like brain-damaged infants. But there’s a difference between letting people believe what they believe and having a situation where a US-funded aid group refuses to give a job to a Haitian man until he converts to Christianity. That shit is not okay, and it’s not anti-Christian to say so. We don’t have to fruitlessly debate the existence of God to point out that turning USAID into a Christian organization is terrible foreign policy.

Of course, some Christians believe that it is their duty to convert the unbelievers, especially the brown, downtrodden unbelievers who have just gone through a disaster and are emotionally fragile and have more immediate problems than a lack of Jesus, such as, their entire families are dead and they have no food or medicine. If you’re one of those Christians that believes that telling those people about Jesus is “helping” them, fuck you. Read more!

Why the Rally to Restore Sanity Sucks

I’m going to Jon Stewart’s big “Rally to Restore Sanity” this Saturday. Why? Well, because I think it will be fun to be in a large group of people who have similar views to mine and are also probably around my age. I like big crowds. Also, some people may dress up and wave humorous signs around, and that’s always fun. Maybe I’ll be on TV! I’m not treating it as a serious political rally, as some critics of Stewart insist on doing. It’ll be fun, I’m taking a free bus ride from New York to DC and back again, and I’ll probably end up getting drunk.

The only thing that worries me is that this rally might very well be the largest lefty political event of the midterm election season—it’s already the most talked-about—and that fits into a disturbing trend: Protests are no longer about anything.

The Civil Rights marchers were protesting the Jim Crow laws and other forms of institutional racism. The Vietnam War protestors wanted US troops to leave Vietnam (I’m leaving out all the protestors who wanted to ascend to a higher level of consciousness through rigorous use of chemicals, they weren’t really political protestors). Today’s big protest movement is the Tea Party and they want—what? Lower taxes? A balanced budget? Prayer in schools? I’ve been reading about them for at least a year, and yet besides the repeal of the Affordable Health Care Act, I couldn’t tell you what these people actually want.

Glenn Beck’s big rally back in August—billed as non-political but pretty clearly linked to the Tea Party—was defined by Beck like so:

This is not a political event. This is to send the message to us and our children and the rest of America: There is a revival going on of values and principles. There is a revival of honor and integrity, and we’re going to demand it of ourselves and our politicians. We are not going to put up with it anymore, in our own lives or in the lives of politicians or our banks and our businesses.

What the fuck does that even mean? In a related question, what the fuck does Stewart’s website mean when it says,

Ours is a rally for the people who’ve been too busy to go to rallies, who actually have lives and families and jobs (or are looking for jobs) — not so much the Silent Majority as the Busy Majority. If we had to sum up the political view of our participants in a single sentence… we couldn’t. That’s sort of the point.

I’m pretty sure I could sum up the political view of the participants in a phrase: left-of-center to far left loony. There aren’t going to be a whole lot of Republicans there, just as there weren’t many Democrats at Beck’s rally. (I’m pretty sure the only Democrats in attendance there were making spiteful documentaries about how ignorant and intellectually inconsistent the Tea Partiers were.) Just as there won’t be any Republicans at the Rally, neither will there be any people who are too busy to go to rallies—they’re going to be too busy. Like Beck’s event, this will be a gathering of people who have mostly similar views on politics and on life but few clearly definable shared goals.

This is a problem because without some clear goals, a protest isn’t going to do much more than make the protestors feel good about themselves for waving signs. A protest or a petition can make politicians aware that a large group of people care passionately about one issue, and that can have consequences. The act of protesting is a cornerstone of yada yada yada. But when a bunch of people gather to say, “We need to restore honor and pride to America!” or “We need to have a civil environment for political discussion!” it doesn’t inform politicians that we feel a certain way about an issue. It just informs politicians that we like to yell and wave signs around.

Anyway, if anyone is going to the Rally, I’ll see you there. I’ll be the guy waving a sign around.
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Language Arts Sucks, Revisited

I was just rereading Michael Chabon’s excellent book The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and thinking about the circumstances that led me to read it, and my discovery of the whole mess of contemporary fiction authors that have influenced me and whose books I’ve carried in boxes from my parents’ house to my dorm rooms to my apartments. I’m lucky to have found the books I love, thanks to the people (not least my mother) who cared about literature and introduced me to authors they thought I would enjoy, and who turned out to be right. Later on, of course, there were the short story collections I went out of my way to buy, and the writing workshop syllabi that forced me to purchase contemporary fiction, and at present I’m pretty confident in my ability to find authors and stories I will enjoy, as long as I have the time to read them.

While thinking about all of this, I suddenly became enraged.

Why? Because I realized that I had taken seven years, in public middle and high school, of “Language Arts,” which was supposed to teach me how to write but also teach me how to read, and more importantly to point me in the direction of books. I learned something from those classes, I suppose, and god knows my teachers tried their best (well, most of them did), but god also knows that those classes did little to influence my love of reading. It might be accurate to say that my love of reading survived Language Arts classes, that I unaccountably love Shakespeare and 1984 despite my education. Most students don’t, and I often wonder if the way we teach literature is designed to stop students from reading.

I know I’ve written the same post before but fuck, isn’t there a way to teach through contemporary fiction that might engage students a little more than teaching them through ancient fiction? Imagine if I was taught The Fortress of Solitude in one of my AP LA classes in high school. It would have given the teacher the chance to talk about:

• Race relations in America. I know this subject is often touched on, but the history of blacks and whites usually stops around the time of MLK. Richard Wright is wonderful, but perhaps a little dated on some subjects? (Also, not insignificantly, this book discusses race from a white [Jewish] perspective.)


• Bullying, intimidation, how you feel when you don’t belong in a neighborhood


• The music of Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, and a slew of old soul, R&B, and fuck groups like the Supremes, the Four Tops, and Marvin Gaye. How many kids know about the tragic death of Marvin Gaye?


• A tie-in to Dylan: The practice of Jewish performers changing their names to more “normal” ones. Why was this important? What does Jewish identity mean? Why did black performers not change their names—oh, yes, because they were given slave names by their masters. Whole discussions of the power of naming might ensue.


• Finally, the idea of superpowers in the real world. What would you do if you had the power to fly? Would you try to fight evil? How? Would you rather be invisible or have the power to fly?

That syllabus for the book I came up with off the top of my head would be far, far, more engaging than any Language Arts class I’ve ever had. With something like Shakespeare, or even Conrad, teachers spend have their time trying to get kids to understand what the fuck they just read, if the kids bothered to read it at all and didn’t give up on the text for being too difficult. (Also, with Heart of Darkness teachers have to wrestle with the question of whether the book is outrageously racist or not.) Would it be too much to ask that teachers teaching literature let their kids know that literature is something that doesn’t just happen in the past?
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I Have Another Blog Now

One reason my posting has been a little bit irregular as of late is that I've been setting up and writing for a new blogging project with a buddy of mine, Christopher Morris-Lent, known to the poker world as CML. It's called We Live Off Your Money and is the diary of a our lives as professional (semi-professional, in my case) online poker players. I don't write much about myself or poker on this blog, so this new blog will hopefully be an outlet for content that I wouldn't publish here. If you like my writing on Essays on Sucking, you may also enjoy We Live Off Your Money, and if you're curious about the life of online poker players, it's also worth checking out. Read more!

Why the Census Sucks

I wrote a blog entry for Vice yesterday about working for the Census in the same area of Brooklyn where two managers notoriously falsified over 4,000 people’s personal information in order to meet their deadline, and I thought I’d add a few points that I couldn’t fit in that limited space:

1. Obviously, if you’re going to have a representative democracy that awards seats in Congress based on population, you need to count the people who live in your democracy. Equally obviously, this is impossible. The US could probably count all the voters in the country more or less accurately, but the Census tries to count everyone from newborn infants to illegal immigrants in 50 states and thousands of large towns and cities. Thanks to pockets of people who want to hide from the government for various reasons, urban areas are probably always going to be undercounted, and that’s far from the only problem. People could lie on their Census forms without anyone catching them, Census Enumerators and low-level managers can lie as long as they’re smart about it, an office clerk could hit the wrong key and misenter some data…it’s simply impossibly improbable that there the number the Census comes out with is right. The only reason the Census exists is so the government can claim that it made a good faith effort to count everyone. The managers who falsified data aren’t in trouble because they screwed up the count; they’re in trouble because they undermine the fictitious notion of an “accurate” Census.

2. But just because the Census is doomed doesn’t mean it can’t do a better job than it does. For starters, they could set up a website where you can send your information to the government electronically—in fact, it’s ridiculous that they didn’t do it this time around. They could mail everyone the standard Census form along with a user ID and password to log into a secure site where they could fill out the form without having to go to a mailbox, and there’s no way the response rate wouldn’t rise. (Can you imagine the anti-government, gun-toting types’ reaction to a website where the government asked you personal information?)

3. Another thing the Census needs to fix is the system they use to train Enumerators. When I trained in Brooklyn, I received exactly the same materials and instructions as Enumerators in Cowtip, Montana, which is insane. Enumerators in cities have to deal with a much different set of problems than the people in smaller towns—for instance, we had to try to get into buildings where the buzzers were broken or no one would let us in. I personally had to continually correct the forms I was given because the listed number of units in a building had no relation to reality. And the requirement that we visit boarded-up or burned out units three times before asking the winos sitting on their stoops if the building was vacant was ignored by everyone because it made no sense to begin with. Privatizing the Census makes no sense for a lot of reasons, but a private company wouldn’t make the mistake of treaties large cities and small towns exactly the same.

4. Despite all this, I recommend a Census job to anyone lucky enough to be unemployed in 2020. It pays well, and there’s a joy in working an insignificant job in a large, poorly managed organization. Or as the late Harvey Pekar once said, “I gotta good gig, man. It’s steady an’ I can fuck off a lot. I’d recommend that every young man look inta th’ possibility of getting a flunky government job.”

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Why White People in My Neighborhood Suck

My intention was to never divulge any kind of personal information on this blog, but for this topic I need to mention some personal details: I'm white, I don't have very much money in the bank, and I live in the Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Bed Stuy, for those of you who don't know, is a historically black, historically fairly poor and crime-ridden neighborhood. Do the Right Thing was filmed here, and so was Dave Chapelle's Block Party. Mos Def and Talib Kweli grew up around here, as did the Notorious B.I.G., who may have rapped in the basement of my building back when it doubled as a kind of makeshift club (Biggie also reportedly sold crack a few blocks away). There's a mural of Ol' Dirty Bastard's driver's license on a wall outside a liquor store near my building, and there's other murals scattered through the neighborhood that memorialize lesser-known folks who died early thanks to guns and drugs.

I'm not trying to brag about how “hood” my 'hood is—and it certainly has gotten safer in the past few years—but there's some areas of Bed Stuy that are, undeniably, pretty rough. There are a few corners where crack merchants hang out, a bunch of project towers, and countless fried chicken franchises, liquor stores, and bodegas where you can buy beer without an ID any time of the day or night. Bed Stuy's also home to a huge amount of diversity. Within the radius of a few blocks you can find Jamaicans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Mexicans, Africans (I mean African Africans, not “African Americans”), American-born blacks, Orthodox Jews, robe-wearing Muslims, Christians who attend hole-in-the-wall storefront churches with names like “The Congregation of the Journeyers of the Holy Spirit,” and even a few white folks, like me.

Well, more than “a few” white folks these days. From my window, I'm watching the fascinating, stop-motion process known as “gentrification.” I guess I'm a part of that process too, even though I didn't ask to be. White people looking for cheap rents—mostly ex-students and the like--have started to trickle in to Bed Stuy, mostly around the edges, and as if it's all part of some master plan the organic food stores and fancy coffee shops have come in with them. You can see sociological trends happen in real time, which is exciting and depressing at the same time. In the past year, a new coffee and wine bar opened up three blocks away, a brunch-serving “gastropub” appeared just down the road, and the building next to mine was transformed from a vacant house into a classy condominium, that people (white people) actually bought. There are other condos in Bed Stuy now too, even some in fancy new glass buildings that look like they've been transplanted from SoHo.

This is part of the urban life cycle, right? The poor, struggling students and artists move to a neighborhood—usually a neighborhood that has a lot of ethnic minorities and poor people in it—because they like cheap rent. Then some businesses that cater to those artists and students open, like new bars and restaurants, and then more white people who like bars and restaurants and feel that the slight scent of urban decay adds “authenticity” or whatever move in, and then rents go up and buildings get renovated or torn down and rebuilt and some people probably protest or whatever but it doesn't make a difference, and before you know it there's a Whole Foods in the Bowery. And the poor people, including the next generation of poor students and artists, find somewhere else to live.

I'm guilty of being part of this, because I enjoy some of the services gentrification provides, like good coffee places that have wi-fi, bars that have fancy beers that taste like fruit and chocolate on tap, and attractive young white women walking around during the summer months. But what I don't like about gentrification—and why I wish all of the white people would just stop pouring into Bed Stuy, can be contained in this anecdote:

I'm getting on the G subway line to go to work, and I need a new Metrocard. So I wait in line behind a few people waiting to use the machine, which, as is so often the case at the Bedford-Nostrand stop, isn't working—this time, it's not taking credit cards. The young, earnest-looking white woman (she looked like an sophomore at NYU) who was dutifully feeding her card to the machine, eventually figured this out and turned to the young woman behind her and asked if there was an ATM nearby. Of course, this being Bed Stuy, every corner bodega has an ATM in it, and there's a bodega on nearly every corner. After being told to go to the bodega right next to the station, the young white woman paused and said, “Yeah, but uh, is it legit?”

I'll stop here to note an important, often overlooked facet of gentrification: the first wave of poor white people who move in (including me) don't want the neighborhood to change, even though their arrival is the first step in a process that will change the neighborhood beyond recognition. I like living in Bed Stuy and not so I can impress people with my “realness.”

First of all, I like the cheap rent. I like buying cheap beer at (sometimes non-legit) bodegas that are open late and always friendly. I like the little kids hanging out on their stoops at one in the morning, and I like the teenagers who roll blunts on the steps of my building after buying weed from my neighbor. I like saying hello to the friendly homeless guys who might be crackheads, and I like walking down Franklin Avenue when the elderly, welfare-dependent drunks are sitting in the sun and hollering at each other across the street. On Sundays, I like looking out my window and watching the old ladies in insane hats navigate the church steps with their canes and walkers. I even like walking past the derelict hulks of vacant brownstones, or at least I prefer those to the newer, glass-and-steel structures going up lately. I don't need a Whole Foods, or even a Trader Joes, and I definitely don't need any more “hip” bars designed to cater to gentrifiers. If these things come in and the neighborhood gets “whiter” and my rent goes up, I'll probably move. If my rent goes up too much, I'll be forced to.

So, to the girl who's looking for a “legit” ATM: get the fuck out of Bed Stuy and get your parents to find you a place in Park Slope or Williamsburg or Brooklyn Heights. You probably shop at Fresh Direct rather than supporting the local shops, you're probably scared of your own neighbors, and you'd probably spend your time at the Starbucks that your kind will inevitably bring. I'd rather live next to a drug dealer than you, because at least a drug dealer is a part of the community in a way you clearly don't want to be. People like you give white people in black neighborhoods a bad name. Read more!

Why Taking a Forced Gap Year Sucks

The other day I was emailing a friend of mine now living in Portland, Oregon, and I asked him if he had found any work. That's a pretty normal thing to ask the folks in my age/education demographic bracket these days—my bracket being kids in their early 20s who just graduated from prestigious or semi-prestigious universities who are mostly the children of middle and upper-middle class parents. Our bracket is getting the shit kicked out of it. My friend is living with his girlfriend (another bracket-mate, working as a nanny), on food stamps, and writing essays that he hopes to sell for low amounts of money. After sending out application after application via Craigslist and a brief, unhappy stint as a kickball umpire, my anonymous buddy has found work at a “really terrible smoothie shop inside of a gym.” This is a guy who graduated from my school a semester before I did, and who can presumably do something a lot better than telling gym rats exactly how many grams of protein is in the mango-strawberry blend. And he's not unique.

Some of my friends moved back into their parents' houses right after graduation. Others stuck it out in the city of their choice, but they usually got subsidized like a failing financial institution by their parents. Most, feeling the weight of their debt to their parents, took any opportunity to get a job that would give them an independent income—meaning they umpired kickball, scooped ice cream, applied to work at Home Depot just like they applied to Princeton five years ago, and learned the intricacies of government programs like unemployment, Medicaid, and food stamps. A surprising amount of them now play online poker for a living, which means they are smart, math-inclined, and disciplined enough to sit in front of their computer staring at numbers for hours at a time, yet they can't get a job. A whole lot of us work for the census, which is paying good money while it lasts, but knocking on doors like Tim Meadows isn't what we had in mind when we got those fancy degrees handed to us. Some of the people I know are going back to school already, either to get a more “useful” degree or to simply hide out in academia for a little longer.

But enough anecdotal evidence, which any competent economist or SABR-matician will tell you is a bunch of randomly occurring bullshit: here's a page of numbers. The numbers say that despite the progress the economy is making, 16 percent of 20 to 24 year olds are unemployed. That's better than the 16 to 19 year old age bracket, but the job market is always tough on 17 year olds—by the time you're in your 20s, you really should be able to get a job. So why can't my peer group get it together?

As with everything, there are a multitude of reasons. Number one has nothing to do with the economy: a four-year degree doesn't mean what it used to. College enrollment has been rising for decades, to the point where every middle class child is expected to grow up to attend the most expensive university that will have him. We did our duty and went straight from high school to college (which is basically high school where everyone gets laid), and when we graduated and got our piece of paper, we found out that everyone else our age had the same piece of paper, and that a bachelor's degree isn't the ticket to a white-collar job it once was. Even before money turned itself inside out, kids who were too old to really be called “kids” were moving back in with their parents after finding out that graduating from college doesn't automatically make you an independent adult. (The trend even has it's own Wikipedia entry.)

But in these troubling economic times, when “sub prime mortgage” is a part of everyone's vocabulary even if no one knows what it means, it's even tougher for young people to transition from college to a job to a career to an apartment without roaches to the final stage in life when you have kids and multiple bank accounts and don't stay awake late enough to watch The Daily Show. When my graduating class went into the job market we weren't just competing with each other but also with the swarm of older, more experienced workers who had just gotten laid off, for jobs that were getting scarcer and scarcer. Is it any wonder that so many of us are sitting in the basement bedroom where we used to masturbate three times a day as teens, playing poker for a living or scanning and refreshing Craigslist every five minutes?

I don't want to exaggerate—some of my friends, through a combination of luck, perseverance and talent, are doing very well, thank you for asking. But it's worth noting that the government, who is in the business of bailouts these days, hasn't done my demographic any favors. Extending unemployment benefits didn't help, since few of us recent graduates had worked enough hours to claim unemployment in the first place. Cash for Clunkers wasn't designed for people who didn't have cars. And I've yet to understand how the TARP money is going to trickle down to us. Politicians don't really care about young people—for all the talk about how the “middle class” and “small business” are “the backbone of our economy,” no one has mentioned what body part recent college graduates are supposed to be. (But I have a guess.) A while ago I had a daydream that the government would step in and directly create jobs through a new program based on the Works Progress Administration and smart, motivated young people would line up in droves to be part of it, but I guess that would be Socialism, and Socialism is what got us into this mess in the first place. (Wait, what?)

The irony to be found here is that the aspiring artists among my generation are more prepared for this economic climate than the rest of us. Artists expect to go through a period of destitution in their early-to-mid 20s. Hell, they practically look forward to it when they're teenagers. But now everyone is basically a starving artist, and that has created a new and weird hybrid economic caste—raised on middle-class values, educated like the upper-class, and now living below the poverty line. We buy organic food with our food stamps. We break off late-night discussions of Lacan and craft brewing to ask each other if the coffee shop down the street is hiring. We go to the library to use the computer and nod hello to the homeless guys hanging out there. We get mildly embarrassed when the rent check arrives from our parents, but that's wearing off. Most of us did actually work hard in college, and learned some skills that we thought would be useful, but no one is buying what we want to sell.

This sucks, right here.

I have no idea what the long-term impact of our demographic's mini-depression will be. At best, I suppose, we'll just be late bloomers when it comes to starting careers, buying homes, and raising kids. (Actually, at best we will rise as one and seize the country in the grip of revolution, but that's not happening.) At worst...who knows? Maybe twenty years down the road, ours will have turned out to be a generation of filing clerks and coffee serves who have whole libraries of unused knowledge in their heads. But I hope not. Read more!

An Announcement About This Blog's New Direction

I don't really have that many regular readers, I know, but I thought I should make a short statement about a slight shift I'm making in the direction of the blog. We we still be focused on describing the ways this world is eating itself from the inside and commenting on the horrible injustices the populace at large just takes for granted, but we won't be publishing (or lately, trying to publish) multiple entries a week. Instead, there will just be one big essay every week, supplemented by more frequent short posts that link to articles that describe the hole of suck that is everyday life. I apologize in advance for becoming part of the endless cycle of reposting that is the blogosphere. Who knows? Maybe some of the shorter entries will run longer. And if anyone reading this has any interest in guest-blogging, I'm always open to that.

The reason for this change (as if you care) is that I'm busier. I don't discuss my life on this blog, but basically I'm doing a lot more work for other people (including Vice and VBS, which are worth checking out if you've never heard of them) and attempting to write more fiction (which will never appear on this site). I can't write three essays a week on that schedule, and hopefully this way I'll be more focused on the one essay and the quality will improve. Anyway, thanks for reading and check back here every Wednesday or so for new essays, and every day or so for new links. Read more!