Beach Sloth

Whatever shit is raw by Ana Carrete

                Ana Carrete is lucky to have a grandmother at age 92. 92 year olds have a hard time keeping up an online presence. Every Facebook comment an elderly person writes tends to be eight paragraphs, indented, double-spaced, and spell-checked. Facebook is no country for the old. Leave it to the world’s youth. The world’s youth has nothing anyway. Give it the absolute bare minimum, something to retreat in to escape a world made for old people. Old people vote for themselves. Wish young people did that. Young people are too busy on the internet to care about unimportant important things. 

                People laugh at the old. That’s okay. Old people still living did something right with their life. Now they reap the rewards of a life well-lived by being absolutely boring and undeletable. Everything in an old person’s mind stays there until the end of their lives. We live through the internet. Why remember anything if there is an entire global system established to remember for you? Wikipedia, Google, they exist as a collective memory, a form of rote memorization. 

                Grocery shopping is part of life. In ‘La Femme Nikita’ she knew how to do everything but grocery shop. Death is different from grocery shopping but not dramatically different. We use household products to convince ourselves ‘Cool, we still have food’ and ‘we’re so relevant we eat yogurt from a tube’. When in reality when we consume this tube-based food we are preparing for a future without teeth. The future is toothless against us. 

                Our genetics dictate who we will be. Genetics are not responsible for personality. Personalities are environmental. That’s the nature response. As we see our parents act a certain way, and our grandparents act a certain way, we may not be able to function knowing we will be like that. Life offers so many wonderful experiences. Wonder if when we are old and alone if we dream anymore. Or does memory become a dream. We vicariously live through our inner child, remembering when we ran around until it no longer meant anything. 

                Sadness affects everyone. No one is immune. Ana is okay with her student federal loans. Under $14,000 in loans sounds reasonable. Over $50,000 is unreasonable. Over $100,000 is very unreasonable. Drinking is a way of coping with an economy that relies on debt as a form of control. Everyone is in debt in some way. Wish debt could be abolished. So far the only example of a debtless society is North Korea and their ‘Juche’ thing doesn’t appear to be working out so hot. 

                This is the sadness of youth looking at the sadness of the old. It is a painful realization of how age defines us.