Notes for a short story

It's difficult to tell if it had to do with 9/11, but one of the noticeable trends after that September amongst almost everyone i knew was that their relationships immediately took a grave turn. Every couple i know either engaged or broke up. I was in the latter. A new seriousness seemed to be piped into the American psyche of those between age 20 and 30. Maybe others too, i don't know. But I can't tell if this was just bad timing for a generation that has entered their own and now faced the inevitable 'now or never' years of early adulthood. Marriage, career, lifestyle, we could only play chicken with these for so long. Was what I noticed then anything other than what millions of lives experience, whole generations simply continuing to discover and rediscover that process which deforms human growth through its deep internal directing of what adult consciousness must necessarily be in America: a rigid, separated, detached external perception, a mode of using and consuming rather than that which we always find and admire in the accepting, enjoying, sharing views of all children. How will we measure the historical catastrophe of the deformation involved in 'growing up?'

In December 2001, I went on a date with an ex who said, if i wanted, she'd give me a baby in a few years time, after i was settled, and after her present newborn had grown up a bit. It seemed suddenly important that everyone feel the values (family, national, romantic) that most of my friends had sworn off for various reasons throughout the 1990s. Don't get me wrong, scholarship remains the enemy of romance, but even the heavily educated put down the books, left the library. Everyone wanted "to live." How to do it, though? Was love possible without exploitation? No protocol had been arrived at yet, and now no one seems to even bother with such questions anymore.

Regardless, though, and on a much more positive note, congratulations to all those newly married in San Francisco last month.