It was too hot for much else, shirts stuck by sweat to the back riding against the unbreathing seats of the car, dropped out after parking as the driver entered the casino by the backmain. Too far ‘a while ago’ for me to remember, the driver became my Mother. She took her seat, out of my sight as I wandered around the shaded concrete parking garage.
He showed off some plastic he found, amidst the piles of shit that had accumulated from various sprees of momentary guilt passing around on wayward journeys to and from liquor and cigs, all the legal vices piled up so we’re still “better than them”, cruising in the pickup that won’t run half-in neutral as Judas Priest sang us onto the casino.
She lost her virginity at the barbecue, bad meat retired to booze and stems-and-seeds weed. The backroom, a mattress on the floor of a ranch style home, dead grass, it was precumming for snowfall in the empty cold of early November. She couldn’t remember it, except that she enjoyed it. He went to prison at 21, both having forgotten the other’s name.
The game was several generations out of fashion, not that any of them could notice. The characters came alive as they were never meant to, shitty discount products made bottom-barrel even at the no-name team of codemonkeys that churned it out on a consumer license. The system was shoplifted anyways, that dying mall where the fat man in Nightwish and Evanescence t-shirts still shared secret knowledge about the upcoming hits of 2007, where he still rated Youtube videos on a five star system, where a shirtless weeb and his fat girlfriend still danced to Nightcore at the cashier’s desk of the only store still selling Tor paperbacks.
In the casino parking garage, two kids were surrounded in a betting circle as they began to fight. They fought in the way children grown past their maturity did, all sloppy grapples, a sort of hugging-sprint all around the predefined arena until one pushed the other down and got their half-punches to indirectly land and maybe get a few bruises in. Both their parents would lose that day, pressing slots until their bladders were near to exploding. That machine was hot after all. Both their parents were hot, once, in the latest fashions they spun out into the wilderness, expecting the same comfort they had been given back at home. They couldn’t find it. The forest was never as forgiving as the city, and back then, the city still promised and sometimes even delivered. They were weathered, having struck out at their own expense, and that of their descendants. Thus earlier than most, they were thrust out. Out of the 20th century dreams of suburban nothingness the others had come up, into the hopelessness that always pre-existed and post-existed them. They were weathered by reality, having taken the great leap of faith to escape the dream, only to find they were seeking the dream all along. So, they settled. Half in, half out, they listened to classic rock and did whatever drugs were legal, they beat their wives and husbands and children, but only to toughen them up. They lived in a facade, rejecting both the wilderness and rejecting and desperately trying to recreate the dream. In all accounts, they failed, and produced a mutated homunculus of no true becoming except the pain of desperation to achieve the unachievable. Their children would have three choices, the same as them. Most would find there’s no more dream to return to and mistake the wilderness for the dream. They’d buy in, foolishly, and the cycle begins again.
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