The Roost Comes Home

​Behold the skeptical light that shines down upon me from a far teen vista, all day, every day. Its pure wattage can be startling at times, but also hilarious. In either case I know I deserve it in full, a karmic retribution for my many failures and reckonings during the second half of 1986 alone. It is amazing though, as a matter of genetics or theological wonder, that her eyes are also mine, replicated in full, bright with a mixture of curiosity, veiled tenderness, and not-so-veiled disinterest. My Stooges shirt is her Brandy Melville skirt, my (lack of) haircut her selfie pout, my turntable her phone, my slammed door her slammed door twice. The generational chasm of the moment, due to a technological leap both unbridled and barely understood, is probably larger than it has ever been in human history. And yet the disdain remains the same, evergreen, timeless.
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We do driving lessons around the neighborhood now, almost every day. She's getting better, but it's harrowing. Oddly, I don't think it's so much a degree of competency, which is probably more or less fixed among sixteen-year-olds, but a fight against sublimated visual information and the corrosiveness of its delivery system. For instance, my driving aspirations were based on the wheel skills of Steve McQueen and Huggy Bear and the Duke Boys and the Bandit if not Smokey. Hers are based on a 24-hour kaleidoscopic influx of targeted data, and much like any random Bovine Spongiform cow who twitches and lows in the morning mist, too distracted to sniff grass or walk straight, teenagers in 2021 seem hard pressed to fuse multiple external inputs; the road, the pedals, traffic rules, other cars, dogs, strollers, tailgating Escalades. You would think the deluge of quick-cut videos and social media affirmations would ideally prepare them for just this sort of thing, but it seems to have had the opposite effect. Last night, while failing to stop at the Very Red Stop Sign, she said, "it's like you're watching a vampire movie," and I said, "what do you mean?" and she said, "you keep flinching away from the window." And it was true, stuck in the nexus between passenger seat and the reality that a two-thousand-pound hunk of wheeled metal is under the tentative, distracted, but also joyously liberated control of a little person that five minutes ago I was spooning mashed banana to, sudsing the bath water with, tucking the duckling blanket beneath the chin of.