Baby Boomers Destroyed The World

Chapter One

My name is Gentry Xavier; how I came to be called by that name is a story for the ages. To explain it all, I will have to go back to the day my world changed forever. It was the day I made a speech in front of thousands of people from the podium in the Amway Center in Orlando, Florida. I remember it all like it was yesterday. I stood in front of all those people, my hands steady after a few cocktails, and I spoke these words.

“Inevitably, at the end of, and the beginning of each year, we are all subject to some year in review served up right to us through the dysfunctional eyes of some Baby Boomer. Their constant comparisons to everything from the sixties and, most strangely, always telling us that our hard times today just aren’t anything compared to some bizarre year they pull out of their tuckus from the sixties.

The Baby Boomers are the most self-absorbed, dysfunctional group of malcontents that have ever been created in the history of the United States of America. These bozos have almost destroyed the entire world, America, the family, marriage, and just about any institution they got their hands on. As Obama screamed at the Democratic convention in 2008 at the Republicans, “Enough!” This battle cry comes from the generation that has to clean up the mess and pay off the crushing debt of this depraved group of people. “Enough!”

The people in the arena gave me a standing ovation. You see, before there was Generation X or any other cute, little name they’re giving themselves, there was what some called “Latch- Key Babies.” The name came from the idea that we were the first generation that came home to an empty house, because our parents were divorced, and mommy was at work. It was the key to the home, above that latch of the doorway that we reached each day to let ourselves into the home alone after school. We were practically raising ourselves and our siblings while a single parent was at work trying to make ends meet.

Everyone’s grandparents were still together at the time for forty or fifty years, while half of all their kids, our parents, were divorced. Yes, the Baby Boomers. Only “their” formative years were the most interesting years of all of the history of our country. These selfish scamps had power, and while running the White House, we ended up with the worst economic crash since the Great Depression in 2008-2009. Just look at the mess this generation has got us into; it’s a disgrace, and the rippling effects are still rolling in 2024!

Oh yeah, if you’re Generation X, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Their war was worse than our wars. Their politics were more meaningful than ours. Their definition of success is the way the whole world should measure things. This is the venal group of people that brought us the term “yuppie”. Over and over again, ad nauseam, still fighting the ideological battles of the nineteen sixties of liberalism vs. conservatism.

This is the same group of people who fought against their parents and government to have free love and then stood in the way of gay people getting married for years. They became the biggest roadblock to the happiness and justice for gay couples while they fought that battle. Boomers are a generational congregation of the biggest hypocrites alive.

Regardless of how this generation started, I’m more interested in seeing how they ended up. Watching them grow old has been painful. These sad people can’t even accept that they “are” old. They pull back the skin on their faces with countless cosmetic surgeries in some insane effort to hold on to their youth. How many of them have we seen walking around among us with their faces pulled back so far that it is bizarre and startling just to look at them? This crazy generation is so vain they won’t even age gracefully. Watching these know-it-alls use the power they sought their whole lives to destroy everything around them has been painful!

I read the article that Michael Medved wrote on 12/31/08, and it set me off. Medved’s dripping condescension that we just don’t have any idea what bad times are reeks of that bloated self-importance that is so omnipresent with these people. To dismiss the hardships and political history of the 21st century is to feel self-importance yet one more time. Being wrong about most things socially and culturally is so stereotypical of the Boomer generation.

These are the people who have brought STDs, Viagra, and out-of-control drug and alcohol consumption to America’s retirement communities. Wife swapping in fifty-five and older adult communities, trying to relive the sexual revolution, became a hallmark of this generation. When everything is said and done, history will show that the Baby Boomers were, by any measure, the most destructive force America has ever produced. Life is a collection of scars, and they have the biggest and best collection. Just ask any one of them; they’d be glad to tell you all about it.”

The crowd rose to their feet in the Amway Center, and their thunderous applause made me realize people have been starving for the truth. I continued speaking to the crowd.

“I sat down drinking an adult beverage with a Baby Boomer one day. We got into a deep discussion of post-World War 2 America and all the changes that have transpired. It didn’t take long while the beverage was flowing that this man started down memory lane about how meaningful and amazing the sixties were. Nails on a chalkboard to me.

He explained to me how you just had to be there. America was going through changes that were so historic, he was telling me. He digressed into a self-deluded tirade on how the generation nowadays has no idea of the historic nature of the Boomers. I sat patiently listening to the wonder years. I mean, after all, the flow of adult libations was financed by him, so I could hardly throw a wet blanket on the fire burning in his eyes as he told me his story.

It was a story I’ve heard before. It was a tale we’ve all heard at one time or another. I mean, they just can’t keep themselves from transposing their twisted version of how important they all were and how history was so big right in front of their eyes. I felt like I was in the Three Dog Night song, “Jeremiah was a Bullfrog.” You know, “He was a good friend of mine. I never understood a single word he’d said, but I’d helped him drink his wine. He always had some mighty fine wine.” So we drank, and I listened while we watched the sun going down on a hot autumn night.

The next day I woke up and was haunted by those words he spoke. I couldn’t believe how clueless and removed he was from how destructive his generation had been to America. How utterly clueless and not self-aware of his own contribution to our decline. He had no understanding of the cancer or virus that has eaten away at the core of mankind at the hands of his generation. His dismissal of history itself after the sixties was stunning.

According to him and his cohorts, I guess not much really happened of any importance after the sixties. I mean, it is not like we got to see the end of the Cold War or anything. The fall of the Berlin Wall couldn’t possibly compare to the Watts riots. The discovery and complete mapping of DNA couldn’t possibly compare to the discovery of LSD, and the application of these two things could never overshadow one another.

Speaking of discovery, yes, I heard the Boomers’ generation made it to the moon, but I guess that is much bigger, juxtaposed to space stations, space shuttles, and the Hubble telescope or going to Mars. I mean, I’m sure science learned more from bringing back a moon rock than it could have from the Hubble or the James Webb Space Telescope and the origins of the universe. All sarcasm aside, I apperceive Vietnam was the war that ended all wars in their minds. I know my generation coasted with those pesky wars in Bosnia, Afghanistan, and those two Iraq wars, but you have history on your side. I guess that giant hole in the middle of downtown Manhattan is not much history at all. I mean, you had the Gulf of Tonkin and all.

No, no, no! I want to understand the sixties. They were so much more meaningful. After all, you did have JFK, and that was certainly history. It is not like you could line up on the wall every picture of all the US presidents and see any history among all those old white guys, with the addition of that new guy from 2008; no, you had JFK. I guess my generation just lacks that presidential history thing.

Now I would never compare the importance of 8-tracks to the Internet. I mean these two things must be equal in historic value. I do want to at least give the credit for having good music in the sixties, but then I remembered it was the American Boomers and the corporations they created that killed music forever. I could go on and on and on, but hey, I think we get the point here.

So now I was going to make sure this Baby Boomer I had these drinks with was going to get a piece of my mind. I picked up the phone (which was not a rotary, by the way) and dialed his number. The phone rang five times, and he picked up. He said hello. Now I was ready. Now I was going to lay this Boomer out. I had had enough. I said, you know! You got it all wrong, DAD!”

Everyone started laughing. In the front row, I could see this woman shaking her head yes violently. My message was being well received. I kept going.

“In the year 2011, the destruction began. The first Baby Boomer hit 65. It started that first year with 1.5 million, and the year after, 1.7 million hit retirement age. After that, the numbers exploded. The Baby Boomers that will be collecting Social Security are the Pac-Man that will eat up the dots, and the dots are us and our tax money. The dots they will feed on are America itself. It is our future they will devour. It is the very survival of our nation that will hang in the balance.

The arrival of the Baby Boomers upon our Social Security System represents the financial death of America in the twenty-first century. There is no escaping the simple math of it. We simply will not have enough workers to support the Boomers in retirement unless we open the doors of immigration far and wide, I guess somebody in charge thought. Just opening the southern border and letting them all in must have been their plan. Everyone knew this math problem was coming. We just kept putting it off or ignoring it. We bathed in a putative denial and turned our collective heads to what was coming.

To this day, most Americans have no idea of the economic tsunami that is coming their way. Maybe we just didn’t want to face it. Perhaps we knew, but didn’t. The Boomers wouldn’t let us solve it, even though there are solutions to this. Any alarm bell rung up to now just fell silent on a “live in the moment” populace. However, the moment of today will crumble under the weight of tomorrow, and all will be lost if this math problem is not addressed.

The sad part of what I’m saying here is not up for debate. Sadly, there is not a chance I can be wrong on this. Only the inadvertent truth of mathematics will be the language of America’s future. Effectively, we won’t even be able to borrow the money to get through this long stretch. You see, the Boomers left us with a multi-trillion-dollar debt to dig out of.

This generation simply destroyed any chance we could have had to handle this as a nation. Their very own destructive path has led to a situation where we will not be able to make the promise of Social Security to future generations without a massive change. They were the first generation in the history of America not to hand over a better America to the next generation. What they handed us was an impossible financial situation that not even Solomon could figure a way out of. We can’t split the baby here.

Let me break this down to something very simple that everyone can understand. How does America, which is broke with a multi-trillion-dollar debt obligation, now pay for all the Baby Boomers to receive Social Security? If you can answer that question, you will go down in history as the person who saved the United States of America. You will also go down in history as the person who could bend the laws of mathematics. Just run the numbers without changing our tax code; it will not work. Don’t listen to me; just go get your calculators. There are fixes, but we refuse to depart from the path we are on.

The Baby Boomers will no longer be able to hide behind their very own self-glorification. All the aspirations of the sixties will not hold weight for the generations crushed under their feet. No self-aggrandizing narrative will amount to a hill of beans when we drown in the ocean of failure left behind.

While Generation X sits and watches the Earth under attack from Baby Boomer Corporations, we find it quite ironic that your Deepwater Horizon oil rig sank around Earth Day in 2010. This time, your greed bled oil into the Gulf of Mexico for the whole world to see. You can’t hide from your failure with that one. You can’t just cart it off to some jail cell with Bernie Madoff. That oil is still sitting on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico, held down by your chemical that is poisoning the sea life and our food chain.

Your stewardship of this world has collapsed in your hands, and no sixties mantra could hide the destruction from you that goes unabated. You are a pernicious virus that has sickened the world’s financial system, dismantled institutions, and now threatens the planet itself. You sought power, raging against the establishment in your youth, only to wreck everything you got your hands on when you became the establishment.

You wage endless wars across the planet. You made the American Presidency subservient to your corporations. You built up governments across the world to crush dissent from Egypt to the bloody streets of Syria.

In America, whispers of revolution are about, but you try to crush it with technology and media propaganda, labeling it extremism. Yet, what is more extreme than what you have done to the world? The division amongst you, as the birthplace of Left-Right Sixties ideology, has left progress and solutions paralyzed.

As we gaze upon the Boomers of Congress, staring at your plastic surgical faces and burnt hair from decades of hair dye and chemicals, we can’t help but see the shadows that you cast from your fat bodies, revealing your forever hungry greed. Quite a contrast to your images at Woodstock, don’t you think?

The ecosystems of nature now scream in the face of death from the greed of your corporations. The jobless stand begging for help after your corporations place them on the streets as orphans of your greed. You wage ideological battles over deficit spending on the backs of the jobless, handing out your crumbs of unemployment benefits and COBRA healthcare. At the same time, you print up money from thin air for all your sick projects of greed, selfishness, and power.

Your apathy at the helm of power glows like the Deepwater Horizon on fire under the blue skies of the Gulf. You are a monster. You are the Baby Boomer Generation. To the aquatic life, you are death itself. The winged creatures can’t even fly away from your grasp, covered in your crude oil. The lucky ones get to be washed free from the toxic chemicals you created under the guise of cleaning products. Going Green has a different meaning to you as you place your head on the pillow of Wall Street.

Life itself bleeds into the desert sands in faraway places, while you wield the power of the military-industrial complexes that you once deplored. The world falls to its knees in your presence. You have become death. You are the Baby Boomer.”

The crowd once again rose to their feet and roared. The country, the world, and our lives collectively had been damaged by the Boomers, and now people had a villain to blame. I looked the crowd straight in the eye and gave them even more.

“I can’t think of any time in my life where I just looked out at the future in front of America with such negativity. Usually I’d be like most, thinking and hoping the future will be better than before. Not this time, my friends; not a chance would I lie to myself like that.

Watching this vast gulf grow between the suffering of our people and our government leaves me with no hope left at all. Watching your government after the economic crash of 2008 and the pandemic of 2020 was horrific. Boomers ignoring the jobs problem and housing issues while forcing mandatory lockdowns is a little too much for me to bear. The rise in the cost of almost everything, from a gallon of eggnog to fuel speculators and their evil effects of up-and-down fuel prices on the common man, is noteworthy. With no decent-paying jobs, no universal healthcare, and the foreclosure of the American Dream itself, you have left us nothing but an untenable mess. Millions of people are caught up in a malicious trifecta of disaster that you created, and the American family can only try to hang on, waiting for the Baby Boomers to leave this Earth by natural causes.

There is little hope in sight. Watching the Boomers make the rich richer and the poor poorer is not exactly the hope and change I was looking for. The decline of America and the slow extinction of the middle and working classes is an ongoing horror show to watch. How you affected countless members of Generation X with your poisonous ideas and mantras was sickening to behold. I just don’t see how we turn this thing around. We have passed the tipping point, and the fall of your stewardship is already in full swing.

You can be drowning in denial all you want, but the evidence of this horrific reality is right outside your front porch. All you have to do is walk outside and open your eyes. We now live in a nation where not even our children are safe. There are maniacs everywhere just waiting to snatch up your unattended kid walking to the school bus stop. The monsters are feasting everywhere, and some of them wear two-thousand-dollar suits and work on Wall Street and Capitol Hill. There is no escaping any of this while the Boomer is alive. You can no longer walk between the raindrops; you will get wet from the Boomer storm.

This country is in a state of disrepair, yet you demand more money for bombs. Watch the free fall of your aspirations go over the cliff. There is no golden parachute for the workingman. There is barely even a job for him that keeps up with inflation. Boomers ignore globalization and changing technology, eating up jobs for humans. Artificial Intelligence looms over our existence, waiting to consume us.

Baby Boomer decadence and greed killed the American Dream. Think about all the financial destruction of 2008 and realize not a single person has been arrested or held responsible for any of it. There seems to be no reset button in sight.

We will be spending a lot of time feeling the effects of the worst American generation for a long time. Even the sixties and that mess spilled over into following decades, and the rippling effect of that polemic still exists today in some ways.

Welcome to the world brought to you by the Baby Boomer and their rippling destruction. The Baby Boomer’s snowball is still traveling downhill at full speed. Now younger generations absorb their failed ideological concepts of liberalism vs. conservatism and perpetuate this endless madness. The snowball of failure is getting bigger and bigger heading for the annihilation of a once great nation.”

At this point, the crowd was eating out of my hand. I could have instructed them to go forth and murder the Boomers, and they would have crushed the glass windows of the Amway Center trying to get out to kill them all. I wondered if this was how Hitler felt. I dug deeper into my argument and spoke.

“With the insanity that surrounded the 2008-2009 Wall Street bailout, the Obama White House found itself in total shock that the executives of AIG decided to give out big bonuses to themselves for a job well done. No one should have been shocked because they were greedy Baby Boomers. The tendencies of the AIG executives to believe they were entitled to that money while the rest of the country crawled on its knees were typical of the Boomers. The Boomers destroyed the entire concept of fairness.

Like the movie The Last of the Mohicans, America should track the Baby Boomer, still the last living one. Like a dog who walks out into a grassy field to die, the Boomers march in unison toward the vast fields of Social Security. Unlike the dog who doesn’t disturb the field around him while he lays his head down to die, the Boomers will set on fire the field and, with their last breath, destroy one more thing on their way out. The most destructive group of people in the history of our union must destroy everything in its path.

We are not close yet to the countdown of extinction of this nefarious group, but we as a society should never put them on the endangered species list and try to keep them around with advanced medical care. In truth, this self-absorbed and destructive life form is more like a virus than any other category of living organisms. The plague that has engulfed most of the world as of late can be traced right back to this virus. The latest symptom of this virus is complete and utter bankruptcy of the greatest nation in the history of the world.

Yes, I know not all Baby Boomers are a virus, and I realize that a portion of Baby Boomers have been fighting this counterculture since the 1960s. However, it must be said that the subgroup of Boomers who have been fighting this virus within have lost the fight. Let me say that again for the Boomers who have fought these people among them. You lost the fight. The virus won, and nothing short of destruction and bankruptcy of a great nation lies ahead.

The Boomers will leave behind a crippling debt that future generations will never be able to pay back or recover from. It is over. We simply will not have enough workers to pay back the tens of trillions of dollars of debt, and our population is too small to have a chance in hell of digging out of this with relaxed immigration restrictions. It is done. The only thing left is the waiting. The waiting for the inevitable.

There was a turning point or a crossroads at which people forty and under could have stopped a lot of this. This was before the bailout plans took hold. If we could have somehow stopped them before this never before seen tax and spend to oblivion took hold. However, we didn’t stop it, and we allowed this virus to spread to the economic security of our nation and throughout the world. The debt Joe Biden and Donald Trump racked up as presidents is unpayable. The rest of the world is trying to come up with their own reserve currency called BRICS.

All the BRICS nations encompass about twenty-seven percent of the world's land surface and forty-two percent of the global population. Brazil, Russia, India, and China are among the world's ten largest countries by population, area, and GDP (PPP), and South Africa all make up “BRICS,” respectively. Others will want to join to get away from our pending doom of bankruptcy.

The Boomers kept us busy watching American Idol and Dancing with the Stars, all while they insidiously enslaved us to rapacious, unpayable debt. They even enslaved the next generations to the government with student loans and destroyed futures not yet born. I once believed that we should build a museum to showcase the venal souls of these people. Maybe build a monument of a giant yuppie fifty stories high, but now I know we will not have any money left to do that. Impassive to their own destruction, the Boomers are not done yet.

There is no doubt many more unforeseen symptoms will spread due to this virus. This quandary has no solution. This virus has no vaccine. We might even have some rosy days ahead. Maybe a couple of economic sabbaticals or decades that will give hope that there is a chance, that there is a future. During these times, some will point back to the view I put forth here and say, “Look, he was wrong; we can make it.” However, this is only an illusion or a mirage in the desert of mass bankruptcy.

The day of reckoning will come. We will pay the piper. We simply cannot pay back this much debt without changing the structure of our economics. It is not possible. The gut-wrenching truth is we have never once ever in the history of mankind cured a virus, and this will be no exception.”

The crowd in the Amway Center stood on its feet, thunderously clapping and cheering me. People were passing out. People had wanted to hear this message for years. They needed to understand why it all got so bad. I walked away from the podium and left feeling like a king or a conqueror. I needed another drink. I felt vindicated. Looking back at it today, it must have been destiny for me to be born Gentry Xavier; I was Gen-X the messenger, and I had work to do. I was reborn, I was new, and I had a very old message. “They” were to blame for why my life sucked. It had been and always will be the timeless “they”.

After the speech, I wanted to get a bite to eat before I headed north on I-75 to my next speech in Atlanta, Georgia. Whenever I am in the Orlando area, I make it a point to go to The Catfish Place in St. Cloud. It is one of my favorite places to eat that is within an hour’s drive from downtown Orlando. There are plenty of top-notch eateries in Central Florida, but for me, I like to keep it simple. The Catfish Place is one of the few restaurants in the State of Florida that actually has a traditional Floridian menu.

Whenever I am there, I always order The Florida Cracker Special. It is an amazing deep-fried utopian meal that includes catfish, frog legs, turtle, and gator tail all in one dinner. It is a guilty pleasure that I try to indulge in with a beer or two, or maybe more, whenever possible. I usually top it off with a slice of key lime pie that is to die for.

This trip to The Catfish Place was a little creepy this time because when I went to the restroom and came back, there was this guy sitting at my table. I sat back down and said, “Can I help you?” The man, who looked to be in his late 80s, said, “I was there at the Amway Center, and I heard your speech.” I was a little put off because I was almost an hour away from the Amway Center, and what were the odds that someone there landed up at The Catfish Place in St. Cloud?

The man was this short, fat guy who looked almost like Barney Rubble. I asked him, “What did you think of the speech?” and he just stared into my eyes with this nondescript look that gave me the feeling he had something else on his mind. Barney Rubble then stood up, put on his hat, and said, “You could not be more wrong,” and he walked out the front door.

I looked down to see if he had messed with any of my food, but I could not tell. I slammed another beer down. The uncertainty of what he did or did not do made me end my meal right then and ask for the check. I walked out into the parking lot and looked around, but I could not see the little dude. I got in my car and drove off.

I made my way to the Florida Turnpike and started to drive north so I could hook up with I-75 towards Atlanta. At the end of the Florida Turnpike, the toll road dumps you into the interstate. I had driven this way a thousand times. I wanted to make it as far as Ocala, Florida, and pull over at Hwy 200 to spend the night at the Hilton Hotel on Highway 200. That Hilton had a bar that I favored, and once I got there and checked in, I headed towards a barstool. I bellied up to the bar and ordered The Devil and The Dew. The bartender asked what that drink was, and I explained to her it was vodka and Mountain Dew.

Of course, most bars do not carry that soda, which is why I always bring a twenty-ounce bottle with me. Ordering that drink is always a conversational segue into any bar scene because no one knows the drink. I think I invented it. A pretty lady in a business suit overheard my conversation with the bartender and sparked up a conversation with me about exotic drinks of all kinds. She told me about a drink called Blue Moon and ordered one to have me taste it. It really was the color blue, and it tasted pretty good for a chick drink. She was a sexy Boomer broad, and I was hopeful that this conversation would lead to a happy ending for the night. My hypocrisy knows no bounds when it comes to getting laid, Boomer or not.

My bladder from the car ride was calling for my attention, and I excused myself and went to the restroom. I stood at the urinal talking to myself about the desirous musings in my head for the lady in the business suit. I was telling myself out loud not to blow it. When I returned to the bar, the lady and I kept the conversation going. I explained to her that I was an author and that I was on a book tour and on my way to Atlanta. About halfway into explaining to her the nature of my book and about my odious or cautionary thoughts on Baby Boomers, I started to get dizzy. It was the weirdest feeling because in no way did I consume enough alcohol to feel this way.

She asked me if anything was wrong, and I told her I was getting sick, that I must have had bad turtle or something. She was shocked and asked, “You ate a turtle?” I said, “Yes, and some frog legs and an alligator.” She looked almost offended, like she was some PETA representative or something. Her angry-looking face abated, and she offered to walk me to my room to make sure I made it. We entered the elevator, and I told her what floor my room was on. The next thing I knew, the elevator door opened up at a different floor, and standing right in front of me was Barney Rubble from The Catfish Place. I blacked out.

As I came to, all I could see was this very bright light. While the room slowly came into focus, I realized my body was no longer in pain. My body did not shake anymore. The first thing I saw was the face of this beautiful angel with feathered blond hair.

She stood over me and said, “Welcome back, Gentry,” and she helped me sit up straight in my hospital bed.

She said, “It was touch and go for a while, and we almost lost you, but you will be fine now.” She turned around and left the room.

Next, a man with a long white coat entered the room and introduced himself as Doctor Patel.

He asked me, “Do you know where you are?”

I said, “Yes.”

“Where are you?” he asked.

“I am in rehab,” I replied.

The doctor stood over me and told me I almost died of alcohol poisoning and was very lucky to be alive. He said I was hallucinating and screaming out incoherent stuff about Baby Boomers. He told me this was my third trip to this facility and that my body might not survive a fourth visit to their lovely establishment. He explained to me they found me passed out in an elevator in Ocala, Florida, and that I was lucky that Ocala was only thirty minutes away from their rehab.

My publishing company sent a limo to come pick me up once I healed up a week later. Many of my speeches had been canceled, and I needed to get back out on the book tour. The driver helped me into the back seat while telling me he loved my views about how the Baby Boomers have destroyed the world. He said that he had read all my books. He closed the door behind me and walked up to the front of the limo.

He sat behind the wheel and asked me, “Where do you want to go, Mr. Xavier?”

“What time is it?” I asked.

He said, “Five P.M.”

I said, “Take me to the closest bar.”

He said, “Ok, Mr. X, I know just the place.” I got on the phone with my people, trying to figure out where I needed to be for my next speech on my book tour. The driver took me back to Ocala and dropped me off at a local neighborhood bar called Hemingway’s. Immediately, I loved the name of the bar.

I walked through the front door of the bar. The place was in a strip plaza. The bar was very small, like most typical local neighborhood bars. It had a square bar with stools on each side of the bar. It had two bathrooms, and there was a hutch with hot finger foods steaming away on it. I loved this place the minute I walked in.

I didn’t have any Mountain Dew on me, so I ordered a Captain Morgan with a splash of Coke and a lime. As I felt the round cocktail glass in my hand and took my first sip, I felt normal again. The only place I ever felt at home was sitting at a bar.

I called my agent, and he said the publishing company had decided to drop me. They had had enough of my drunken shenanigans and canceled my book tour. I was told they would no longer promote my book and that they were wiping their hands of me. I was sitting on the bar stool in total shock.

My agent told me that the real reason I was being dropped was that the owners were Baby Boomers and they hated me. My head was spinning, and I was not even drunk. I looked at the bartender and asked for a double. I sat and thought about the words of Aldo Nova, “Life is just a fantasy, can you live this fantasy life?”

I could not remember whether that woman at the bar a week ago was real or not. I wasn’t sure if Barney Rubble even existed. Everything could have been a delusion as far as I knew. Maybe my publisher did not drop me either. To say that it was hard to wrap my mind around reality is to say the obvious. At this point, I felt like a psychosomatic psycho. I thought I was crazy, but maybe it was all in my head.

I made my way home and sobered up on my own. Weeks later, I wrote all of this down for you to read. I mailed it to the competing publisher. So, if you are reading this, they published it. I drove my car to Disney World in Orlando, Florida. I made my way to the new parking lot that they had just built. I heard people were driving all the way to the top level and killing themselves by jumping off.

I felt like it was such an odd thing. Did the engineers who built this multilevel concrete parking garage have any idea it would be used as a gathering point for suicides? I got out of my car and walked to the edge and looked down.

I could feel the power and energy that existed at this spot. I looked down and saw the drop was big enough to put an end to one’s life. No guardrails stood between desperation and demise. It was a freefall into the abyss. It was a bridge of sorts to the afterlife. I felt at ease, and I took the Nestea Plunge into Perdition. My last thought before I hit the ground: “Fucking Boomers!”

Dedicated to John Kennedy Toole, American novelist

The End

C. Rich