The 1900s. They’re for the history books now. Just to say it, just to think the words—the 1900s—makes the years sound already antiquated. What were they, anyway, those hundred years? The assembly line and the hydrogen bomb. Television, computers, rock and roll. Wars, she supposes—she missed Vietnam, and she was only a giddy junior high kid when the Gulf conflict looped itself out—but, yeah, she shuffles back through the images she’s received about this century and she sees the images you see, the screeching Hitler and the bodies coming home from Vietnam, and she knows there’s other wars in there too, imageless ones that she just barely knows about, the invisible grapple over Korea and the anachronistic geopolitics of Double-U Double-U One.
And now she’s here to see the end of it all. This dissatisfied girl gets to watch the exhausted century kick back and relax with the long dull novel of ten peaceful, prosperous years.
She thinks it’s an illusion. This boom. The happiness and prosperity. She doesn’t know anyone who it’s happening to, really. All she knows is unhappy people who have maxxed out their credit cards and people unhappy stuck being circuits and switchers in a machine that’s larger than them. She packs up her books on this last day. Nowhere to go except back home to her parents.
I won’t grow up, I won’t grow up, I won’t grow up.