I Had All and Then Most of You

OPENING MONOLOGUE

Hello there from Poland.

No, you haven’t gone crazy. I changed the title of the newsletter while I was doing some newsletter housekeeping last week. Notes from Paraspace felt too abstract for what I’ve been trying to do over the last few months, so I changed it to the more flexible Pop Culture Must Die.

This gave me the chance to bring the newsletter into one of the many domains I’ve been keeping for a rainy day. I also used the transition as an opportunity to import all of the old newsletters here (and finally delete my Substack account in the process).

Outside of the new name and having its own website, this newsletter will keep providing you with what you know and love, week in and week out.

As always, thanks for reading. You really are the best.

Today's reading

• This is the Hard Part

• X Marks the Spot

• “You see this guy?”

• Heavy

This is the Hard Part

There’s this small village in Poland. Just a few farms, not unlike many villages throughout the country. But this village, you see, happened to be located where trains had to slow down to navigate a particularly sharp bend.

During the war, trains would pass by with wagons packed with Jews on their way to extermination camps. When the train slowed, some of the parents would see an opportunity. They’d get the smallest children, often babies and toddlers, through the spaces of the wooden walls or barred windows, and they’d drop them outside.

These villagers would find small crying children and babies along the railroad tracks near their farms. At first, understanding the situation, they took the children in. Some were hidden, some adopted as their own. At night, the sound of the train getting closer would make the villagers anxious. They’d pray that when the train passed by, the fading sound of the engine wouldn’t be replaced by the ascending cries of a child left alone in the darkness.

The trains kept coming, and more and more babies were left in the fields.

It was becoming too much. It was impossible to hide all the children. There were too many. How could they fool the Nazis who patrolled the area? If they were caught, the Nazis would kill the children, and most likely everyone else.

Eventually, the locals had no choice. When babies appeared in the fields, they reported it to the Nazis. The soldiers would go into the fields with pitchforks. When the Nazis left, the fields were silent.

It’s horrifying, right?

You know what’s more horrifying?

This was the easy part.

Let’s flash forward twenty, forty, even fifty years later. Now there’s this village with a dark secret. Guilt surrounds this secret so tightly that the secret feels small in comparison. It’s an unbearable weight; the kind that erodes your soul.

The villagers can’t make it through the day without remembering their choices. And when it’s night, forget it. The train track is long gone and the deathly silence from the fields feels like an indictment. There is only guilt and shame — parasites endlessly feeding on the fruit of their suffering.

Nothing they did was their fault, but you try to convince them of that. The face of every child who survived — now adults who don’t know their own history — is a reminder of the countless children who didn’t make it.

These villagers will never forgive themselves. They will spend the rest of their life replaying their decisions and beating themselves up with fantasies of what they could have done.

Their grandchildren say, “If it was me, I would have saved them all.”

Their great-grandchildren say, “If it was me, I would have fought harder.”

But these villagers did what they could, right?

This is their punishment for being in the wrong place at the wrong time — a lifetime of wondering if they did enough.

This is the hard part.

X Marks the Spot

One of the books I finished last week was Douglas Coupland’s Generation X. It’s true. Here’s a picture to prove it!

It’s not a great book, but it feels important, which is probably why I’ve been lugging it around the world since I bought my copy in 1993. It’s a book of its time, for sure. Hell, it literally named a generation, so credit where credit’s due.

I revisited the book for the first time in over three decades because I feel like Generation X — despite our insistence that everyone ignores us — is about to be put under the microscope and I think it’s going to be ugly. So I wanted to be reminded of what we were supposed to be about.

(Before I get into this topic, let me say a few important points. First, every generation feels important and unlike every generation before it — a fact that’s most likely true at the start. Second, it’s the nature of every generation to sell out in the end, whether intentionally by the generation itself, or how others perceive it. Third, all discussions about generations are inherently bullshit because the idea of labeling generations and defining their characteristics like zodiac signs is a 20th-century concept. Fourth, and let’s be real here, generations are defined through the prism of the white experience, and rarely, if ever, consider the full spectrum.)

One of the things that makes Generation X special is that, unlike previous generations, we had an instruction manual in Coupland’s Generation X.

Now you could argue that every generation gets an instructional manual (or two). Baby Boomers had books like Catcher in the Rye and Catch-22, right? Sure, but the instructions were implicit. And honestly, especially in the case of Catcher in the Rye, some people got the wrong message.

However, the instructions for Generation X are explicit in the eponymous book. Generation X even includes a glossary of terms and expressions. It outlines everything that defines our generation — self-sufficiency, cynicism, independent thinking, irony, etc. It highlights the short end of the stick we got from Baby Boomers and even offers ways to maximize that stick. Can you believe it?

Generation X is a small miracle. The right book at the right time, like Zima.

So how did we screw it up so badly?

“You see this guy?”

Adam Sandler tells a story about his NYU acting teacher who once took him out for a beer to say, “Listen, kid, you have heart, but you just don’t have it as an actor.” The teacher recommended that he consider another career path.

Years later — at the height of his fame — Sandler runs into the teacher at a bar. Sandler approaches the teacher with his friends and says, “You see this guy, everyone? This is the only teacher to ever buy me a beer.”

Heavy

I ran over an alligator once. This was back in Florida. I was 17. I was driving to work in the family van when I came around a bend to see a large alligator in the middle of the road. I swerved as best as I could, but I hit it. I pulled over and got out of the van because I was a sensitive kid, and stupid, clearly. Like, what was I going to do? Perform CPR? Snout-to-mouth?

There was blood on the road, but no gator. As best as I can tell, I ran over the end of its tail.

I think about that alligator a lot. I hope he’s all right.

You know who is all right, though?

That’s you, dear reader. Have yourself a great week!