I.

Just before Ronia was leaving for a flight, she addressed me in a serious tone. It's the tone I use when I'm not being serious at all, so I should have clocked it immediately. For example: I might lean my shoulder against her doorframe, and say, hey. I don't know if you heard the recent news alert. But there was an incident at the zoo's Darkfang exhibit, and one or more of these terrifying serpents was inadvertently released.

It's clear by this point that she's not taking the threat seriously, which means I haven't communicated the very real danger such creatures present. "It's like a Ghost Snake," I'll say, my brow knit to stitch the mortal threat into place. "Even an ordinary snake constitutes a wily opponent. Imagine if physicality itself were no object! Imagine if a snake had mastered Death."

"Release me," is her typical response. Anyway, this time, she said, "Dad, if you go to Florida… please. Please," she said. "Make sure that cookie tea."

"Daughter," I replied gravely. "Only one beverage has this power."

II.

Trim's viral banger "Coconut Water" often veers into magical realism lyrically. It plunges the club-bound listener into its masterful phalanx of metaphors and literals, situated somewhere between the ironical and the merely ronic. At one point she either offers (or threatens to) leap onto a man's face, calling to mind H. R. Giger's eponymous Alien, and grind with such tenacity that sparks are generated. She suggests that she is able to keep a loaded firearm in her sandal, which some experts (Beauregard, 2026) have suggested may be a sly reference to Robert Rodriguez's grindhouse revival flick "Planet Terror." Near the peak of the track's erotic zenith, she implies that her man is willing to have sex even if it's late at night. I don't feel like this is of a piece with the other more fanciful claims. It's like, yeah, Trim. Nighttime? A lot of people have sex then.

III.

When I was younger, there was adult culture and there was culture for younger people. Media broadly had a physical component, which outside the radio was typically gated by a purchase. Ronia and I wouldn't have had a lot of overlap in our media space. Now adults consume books and cartoons expressly produced for the young with great regularity, and any bar to access the world of the Adult - and I mean that on absolutely every axis - has been obliterated. Unless your dad was in IT, "contamination" of this kind of is an absolute certainty. I regularly have conversations with my brood that would have vaporized my mother. We get exposed to a lot of the same music because we are on the same apps, which is why we both know that Trim is drinking coconut water to optimize her genitals for an upcoming trip.

IV.

I doubt my father even knew if my sister had a vagina or not. If you asked him to his face, I think he'd say it was a coin flip. They were so alike that he probably just assumed it extended, yea, even unto the southern reaches; it just didn't work like that then. A normal commercial that came on TV all the time essentially said that strangers could probably smell your rancid void, you dumb dirty bitch, and you had to buy their shit to fend off your own rank, traitorous body in the manner of a lion tamer. That commercial would come on and my mom would leave the room - but I had no idea what the fuck they were even talking about. Was that even a thing? I still thought the actual vagina was in the front for some reason, a few inches below the belly button. I wasn't aware that they required regular oil changes. I didn't know you had to get them up on the scope and run a full diagnostic battery, the technician clucking at his clipboard, face wan. In my life, there was a time before Tori Amos said, "Boy, you best pray that I bleed real soon," and then the ever expanding after. We are still in that time, and it continues on. The eighties were very weird and the nineties provided a frank riposte: namely, is it possible to live without lying twenty-four hours a day?

In contrast to my dad, I know the maximum amount about all periods in this house at all times. I know about which apps are the best and the luteal phase and when a large smoothie might have the most potent effect. I get frequent updates regarding flow. It's only weird in comparison to the previous regime, but yeah. Kids come out to you at dinner, and they still have to take out the trash. We get to have much more three dimensional relationships with these beasts, regardless of those regions a bathing suit might cover. This frankness is bidirectional. I'm not, like, a buddy - they're going to need to have boundaries if they're going to have a durable identity, and I'm happy to be the display model. But I'm a stalwart ally, I have a variety of useful experiences, and provided you have done the dishes like you said you were going to I can absolutely help you model the world.

V.

In the same way Kool Herc or Grandmaster Flash would make songs out of the best parts of other records, these wicked teens inhabit and remix the cream of humanity's creative canon at will. They have access to all of it and make use of this trove. I had to drive one of their elite strike teams to a dance once, and their entire playlist consisted of music from before any of them were born. That wasn't a theme, or anything. These get hype tracks are simply all timers and have not been bested.

As for their mode of speech, well, where to begin. The ruins of the American Empire are like a jungle gym for them; the gallows is just another kind of swing. A huge chunk of their youth, by volume, was stolen by a virus at a time when people are typically learning where the boundaries are. They don't stand on fucking ceremony. But it's more than that.

The ones I know well simply do not… trust any of these social systems to work in precisely the way my cadre didn't trust them. They've had the opportunity to see and feel the failures in their own lives; they will be very confused when they get to the end of Watchmen and find a concept more fanciful than a flying man. The party was pretty clearly over near as we could tell, too, and if there hadn't been an Internet to defibrillate that era God only knows what would have happened. Of course, our masters fucked That up too. That potential has been captured now, wholly gentrified, and the kind of hardware you need to have fun with it is becoming a no-go via RAM cartels fed by this AI circlejerk. The ladder is being kicked down. They have reinvented feudalism from first principles.

I've been very surprised to see the Artist Formerly Known As The R-Slur touring again, but that's mostly with edgy olds - the most we might get around here are attempts to reclaim the new F-word, which just hits my ear so wrong that I had to make a proclamation regarding its use ("don't use it"). In my neighborhood, to the last of them they're hitched securely to progressive ideals and simply can't imagine themselves using these words as weapons at all. They are looking at a world so plainly wanton and grotesque that speech codes around ghoulish, naughty kirkification have no teeth. They know in their bones that evil clowns are at the tiller. They know that nobody is coming to save them, that History has resumed, and no-no words aren't even a top five concern.

(CW)TB out.