Audacity BFG’s

When I tell people all of the places I’ve lived, they ask why I move so much. I tell them I don’t. I usually sit on the couch. I was born in the second biggest city in the U.S., Los Angeles. When I was 5 years old, we moved to the biggest city in the U.S, New York City. Then, just as I got comfortable with my one man friend group, my father got antsy with his job and we moved to the biggest city,,,in all of South Dakota, a city called Sioux Falls. It wasn’t even the touristy part of South Dakota, where most people visit, like Mt. Rushmore, the Badlands, Custer State Park and Historic Deadwood. Nope just the one trick pony city of Sioux Falls, that is famous for…the Falls, I guess?

In one particularly memorable day in my first year there, in January 1982, our newspaper’s headline was -85 Wind Chill? My reaction was, “Yes, and we should stay home.” However, my parents didn’t care about our well being, so they sent us to school that day. The bus picked us up, and dropped us off right across from the the side door we went in. It is speculated that if we would have taken 11 steps instead of the standard 10 steps we normally took, we would have frozen in place. We were living in a place where the temperature would have made Elsa feel uncomfortable and want to wear a parka. After spending 8 years in the two biggest cities in the United States, living in South Dakota, even the biggest city in that state, we might as well have moved to the Little House on the Prairie. Not ironically, De Smet, South Dakota, famous for being the childhood home of Laura Ingalls Wilder, was only 100 miles from where we lived. I’m surprised my dad didn’t make us walk there uphill both ways to “appreciate what we have”.

We suffered unimaginably there. Not only did we have to walk uphill both ways, we had to do it in -85 windchill weather. We kept prodding my dad to get antsy again and move somewhere that above zero temperatures, but for some reason, he had a hunch that all that bitter weather would me bitter and want to start a blog someday. At least he got one thing right. My resentment and utter bitterness towards South Dakota winters goes deep into my bones. I shutter whenever someone tells me to chill, because all I can think when I hear that is windchill. He never moved until I graduated high school, so it was up to me to find a way out of there.

The moment they dropped me off at college, I felt an immediate weight loss from the windchill that resided on my shoulders. I immediately felt at home the moment I stepped into my 5 square foot dorm room. It was a small college town in Idaho, that got ALMOST as cold, but the temperatures stayed above zero, so I was living in a tropical paradise in my 3rd floor dorm. I left the frozen Tundra of the Little House on the Prairie to live in the Little Dorm in Idaho. For the first time since New York, I was free.

It was also the first time I wasn’t in a city. It was a town. I’d lived in a lot of cities (or suburbs of cities) in my life. Los Angeles, New York, Sioux Falls, Salt Lake City, Seattle. I’ve visited many of the biggest cities in the United States, like Orlando, Las Vegas, Chicago, San Antonio. I’ve visited some cities in Scotland as well, like Edinburgh, Glasgow, Inverness, and Stirling. Some of these cities are amazing.

The one city that I will never understand is the City of Auda, better known as Audacity, the capital city of Delusion, also affectionately known as Delululemon.

I’ve lived through a lot of time periods, such as the 70’s, 80’s, 90’s, the 00’s, and the 10’s, but I’ve never seen the City of Auda as strongly as I’ve seen in the Covid 20’s. I’m a Gen X, the generation comfortably sandwiched between the Boomers, and the Millennials. We’ve mostly sat quietly on the sidelines while the Generation Wars between the boomers, Millenials, Gen Z, and the Alphas rage on on Social Media.

In a way, it’s nice to be an observer of the war. I like to think of us as the bridge between playing outside without much concern to catching the internet at the end of our college years. I’m not completely lost when it comes to smartphones, video games, Ipads, and AI. In fact, my generation (and not me personally) is part of inventing a lot of great things you love today, like gaming culture, YouTube and Google.

Since I grew up in a time period where we had to go to college to get a good job, we had to apply for jobs by going to companies and asking for paper applications, and we had gatekeepers guarding fame, I find kids these days have an amazing sense of the City of Auda.

Many of them have these almost delusional thoughts about how careers are supposed to work. Most of them want to work from home, which is fine (though I never have). But when they are asked to come in to an office even a few days a week, and they throw a Tik Tok Tantrum, I feel like giving them a Gen X reality check. When I get asked to do something I don’t like, I will push back, but I don’t throw a tantrum and I definitely don’t do it on Tik Tok. Remember, I had to go to school on a day when the temperature was -85 degrees outside.

Another group of youngins that live in the city of Auda, and in its suburb, Social Media, almost 24 hours a day, are a particular segment of young women (IE not ALL of them) in the dating pool these days. When some interviewers ask them what they are looking for in a man, their first answer is often “someone who can provide for me”. When asked to expound on what “provides for me” means, they usually elude to people that make a minimum of $500,000 a year. When asked what else they want, they say someone who is loyal, under 25, handsome, over six feet tall, goes to the gym every day, is there for me all the time, takes care of the kids, cooks, cleans and massages their feet at the end of the day. But gets mad when asked what they give to their man. And they look blankly at the interviewer. “Like they get ME.” The interviewer will then give them the algorithm of that guy existing as a .00000000000, and they either look shocked, or say, “I know he’ll find me.”

That is not to say that the youngins on the other half of the dating pool don’t live in the suburb of Delululand either. A lot of the young guys in the same dating pool expect to stream one time and get famous, put a post up on TikTok and get famous, or go to the gym once and expect to get a D1 scholarship for football so they can get famous and collect their $500K a year and start driving Lambo’s when they graduate from High School.

Both sides of the youngin’s expect their jobs won’t be 40 hours a week, they can work from the Bahamas, that AI will write all their papers, their robots will massage their feet and their mansions will have big windowed views of the city. They also expect that their streams of playing video games or taking naps will go viral and they will be able to retire by they time they are 25.

As a non-resident of the City of Auda, it’s a good thing I plan to work until some of these Gen Z’s retire at 25, so there is at least someone at the office to turn on the lights for the robots, since even the robots wouldn’t stoop that low.

You know, because who would still have the city of Auda to want to leave the house and go somewhere in the future? While some of you still live in Audacity, I invite you to come out to the suburbs once a week to enjoy some Bitter Friday Giftures…

When I tell people where I’ve lived…