There's a waterfall cascading over the 110 South
"Feel the rain on your skin," INDEED, Natasha Bedingfield
I don’t know if this latest round of Southern California rain is considered an “atmospheric river” like we had two (three?1) weeks ago, but the precipitative effect felt about the same yesterday, as I was driving south on Los Angeles’ crazy/beautiful 110 Freeway. No one can drive in the rain here, it’s a well-documented fact. Rain is to the native Angeleno as it is to the Wicked Witch of the West: life-ending, looks-destroying. “STAY INDOORS” might as well be blared from non-existent emergency sirens. “IF YOU CAN STAY HOME, DO.” Most people do.
But not a native son of the Garden State like me, let alone someone whose livelihood of late has revolved around Lyft driving. Soggy people need picking up, too! And I was taking one of those soggy people deep into the heart of the Southland when I saw it: the waterfall. There’s a rail line that runs alongside and sometimes right over the 110, an echoing transportation artery. And as happens when there’s a lot of water pooling in a high place, gravity and displacement force that water into a low place — in this case the freeway. In the abstract, it’s a thing of urban wonder: a steady sheet of water, as steady as any water feature you’d encounter on the Jurassic Park2 ride at Universal Studios, pouring over the second-leftest lane. I saw it from probably a quarter mile away and, if not for the passenger in my car, would have absolutely made a bee-line for it — the automotive equivalent of running through the sprinkler. “There are beautiful things in this world if you just look,” etc. etc.
Reality is: there was a giant crack in the overpass, out of which spewed this endless bucket of rain, and for as majestic as I found LA’s Great Freeway Falls, the only reason it exists is due to infrastructural oversight. With enough time, and enough rain, that crack becomes a hole. The hole spreads. It all comes crashing down.
…Anyway, that was on my mind when I scrolled through Twitter twenty minutes later and found myself getting suckered by the latest Millennial rage-bait.
My generation has been reading shit like this for fifteen years. We bought all that dang avocado toast instead of saving for home ownership. We’re not providing our parents with enough grandchildren. We killed Applebee’s. Even now, even as we rapidly approach (and/or already live in! I acknowledge the existence of even older Millennials) our 40s, we continue to be talked down to like children by generations above us who refuse to give us a seat at the table, and then ask why we aren’t sitting down. Infuriating! Predictable!
Rage-bait is, of course, designed to bait your rage. (Sounds sexual.) Headlines like this are lab-engineered to elicit a response, online, that translates into clicks and replies and quotes and maybe even DISCOURSE (hand raise), all of which drives traffic aka $$$ back to a parent company who could care less what everyone is actually talking about. Hell, it’s not inconceivable that the headline — or even article itself — were generated by AI, the possibility of which I would have written off as conspiracy theorizing a year ago but today just feels like self-protection. We’ve already seen publications do this; it has been done! Interrogating the literal humanity of anything we read online now is sadly just modern media literacy.
But let me ‘bait for a sec?
The “bigger paychecks” part — I’m currently a Lyft driver/unemployed-but-always-hopeful screenwriter and most of my liquidity is in Ubisoft bucks3, but I have to assume this is probably true, even if “bigger” is largely a function of natural inflation. That’s not the real bait here. No, you’ve already correctly identified it as “short-term purchases like groceries and vacations.”
Now, until yesterday, I was under the impression that groceries were more of a “basic needs” thing. Like, I don’t know, the stuff you buy each week to provide your body with nutrients and regulate vital processes, processes that allow you to keep working, work that provides money with which you might buy more groceries and thus keep you and your family physically alive? But maybe I’m fucking stupid! In some senses I can respect the rebranding effort at play here — from the aforementioned “you Millennials and your avocado toast!” to “you Millennials and your body’s demand for sustenance!” Dystopia but, like, make it cute.
The “vacations” thing is also insane, first of all because who are these Millennials you’re talking to constantly taking vacations??4 but also because oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize taking a break was the exclusive domain of those who came before. Our bad! It’s also not the first time we’ve had this conversation — ten years ago, trend pieces were calling these same vacations “experiences” and bemoaning the fact that this is where we were putting our money, and not into, idk, fine china. In either case, the criticism fails to interrogate WHY someone (Millennial or otherwise!) might want to be taking a vacation in the first place. Could it be to briefly escape the feeling we’re just stuck on a sociopolitical conveyor belt, heading into the exact same presidential election we had four years ago, with little agency of our own outside what “short-term” cereal brand decisions we’re making? WHO COULD SAY.
It’s still raining in LA as I type this and, presumably, the waterfall on the 110 South keeps falling. I’ll drive today — maybe even back there! — and shop for groceries later (there’s a new Oreos variety, Space Dunk, that was algorithmically designed for people like me). A month from now I’ll join the Fogs on a long overdue family vacation. A million exhausting headlines will have been generated in the interim, artfully engineered to waste our time (🙋🏼♀️) and exhaust us to the point of numbness — an endless waterfall of bad-faith takes5. There may be nothing to do, individually, about the actual freeway fissures. But I suppose we can all choose to be a lot less online!
at Lifting Fog, journalism takes a back seat to journaling
I’m assuming now World
in the worlds of ‘Far Cry’ and ‘Assassin’s Creed’, yes, I am a rich man
much longer piece about the intersection of generational wealth and disproportionately high-paying fields that I am neither smart enough nor dumb enough to write
Not sure we totally stuck the metaphorical landing here, buddy, but let’s give it a solid B
You tell em, bud.