delete this

overheard #12

“no talking!”

“we weren’t talking, we were singing minecraft parody songs!”

this site has one setting

i never noticed how strong that penguins braid game is

thats a raccoon

no thats a french braid

No thats pocahountas

No that’s a Native American

Risa: Don’t you ever want to talk about your feelings?

Connor: No.

Lev: I do.

Risa: I know you do, Lev.

Lev: I’m sad.

Risa: I know you are, Lev.

Service dogs training to sit through a movie at a theater.

It’s actually better than that - the picture comes from dogs being trained to sit through a PLAY… which means there are actors on the stage performing a musical for a theatre full of dogs.

[image: several rows of theater seats, with at least an ear visible of over a dozen patient dogs.]

You would not believe Bill Nye

If ten million Science Guys

me strumming a happy D chord because everything is going to be ok!

anyone want to band together to overthrow the government? wear masks? drive around in the desert? give ourselves nicknames to evade capture? huh?

Last time I went to the zoo I saw a baguette in a cage, .

when I asked the keeper about it, he said it was bread in captivity

ive had this idea in my head for a couple days

It’s not fair to the children.

Welcome to Gen Z! If you’d like to enjoy the full stay

Make sure your family judges you in every way

School supplies may include a loaded gun and a child’s cry!

But none of our judgmental elders fucking question why?

They just blame the times and parenting

The spoiled children wasting their lives

In an escape because in real life they’d rather die.

Welcome to Gen Z!

Where you can order your disorder

Served on a platter of questioning your validity,

Because here you “don’t fit in if you ain’t like me”

Welcome to Gen z,

Where it’s not fair to the children that were spending our childhoods trying to fix what the adults can’t

Because we can’t look up to them

They keep looking down on us,

Looking away,

Ears closed as every shotgun bullet leaves it shell

And sends another “confused gay soul” to hell.

Welcome to Gen Z

Where it’s not fair to the children.

Where your prayers are never heard

And your voice isn’t valid!

We can’t start a revolution if we can’t start a lawn mower, after all, right?

We can’t say we disapprove of expecting everyone we ever meet to someday die by rape or gunshots or by the kid no one expected.

It’s not fair to the children

For you to forget them,

Ignore them,

Invalidate them.

Welcome to Gen Z!

Where were quite tired of your bullshit.

We don’t need guns to make a difference.

Give us paper and pens and megaphones,

Give us every reason we can’t

And we will show you we will.

Welcome to Gen Z,

And if you don’t have faith in us the door for the bigoted is right over there,

Next to the discarded prayers

for mercy you ignored.

Welcome to Gen Z.

Where we aren’t going down easy,

And we won’t let you see our change as a chore.

Welcome to Gen Z-

Don’t like us? There’s the fucking door.

daaaaaaaaaaammmnn

A poem about Gen Z

I didn’t ever want to be this way

You ask me why I want to call it a day

Because every second I walk down those halls it’s like a forest of eyes staring me down from behind whispering words of hate and spite and wanting nothing more than to be happy with my life

I AM PRIVILIGED

In theory

On paper

I am happy

I have a home

I have a family that’s together

But I am not okay.

Walking these halls holding hands with my friends without anyone calling me gay would be a dream

Why do kids do this?

To escape?

Because they’re afraid?

You adults, you Generation X’s and Y’s, you don’t get it, you blame the media, the news, anyone but yourselves

While kids like me are falling to their knees from the payload of the entire world on their back

It’s because we know we will never be enough for anyone but ourselves and once that sinks in we can’t even want to get out

There is a statistic that says that 1 in every 5 teenagers has a mental illness. I hate that statistic. It’s a lie. Because I could take out a yearbook right now and tell you how P tried to kill herself in front of her best friend and how M isolates herself from the world. I could tell you about how S feels like she’ll never be enough so she works harder and harder and stays up later and later and for who, you ask? For the grades? HAH. She doesn’t care about her grades. She wants her parents approval

I hate that statistic because I watched a kid I’d known for four years burst into tears because the teachers, people like you, told him that he wasn’t enough, to his face. Because kids with parents like you all told him that being in theater was gay. That he was disgusting. Those same kids that bullied him are kids with anxiety, depression, insomnia, and an overwhelming sense of drowning in every sense of the word because all their senses are being drowned out by senseless rules and lectures and demands that they be perfect

WE DONT WANT TO BE PERFECT

A man I look up to once said that middle school is like one big popularity contest and everyone is loosing. And I agree.

Mom dad I’m sorry for this I didn’t mean to embarrass you. I didn’t mean to act out.

I’m sure you didn’t mean for it either.

There are kids in Africa with no phones so be grateful

There are kids at my school who have to literally claw themselves out of a gutter instead of waking up every day because not a single person cares that they are about to drown in raw sewage.

We are privileged.

That does not mean we are happy.

That does not mean I can ever be okay

That does not mean my friends doesn’t get pulled aside every time at the Airport because of the color of their skin

That does not mean that P and M and S and all those 1 in 5 will ever be happy with themselves

You think I’m not trying

You think we aren’t trying

On top of having to wonder if we are going to get murdered tomorrow or if this drill is just a drill, we have to worry about whether we like girls or boys because god forbid I’m in love with a woman and god forbid my best friend is gay. Apparently I’m just confused because there’s no such thing as ‘bisexual’ and apparently my friend is just ‘too young to know the difference’

Apparently you all think that your decisions are more important than our emotions

Apparently school officials know better than us when it comes to our stress because it must be the smartphones

Apparently Donald effing Trump thinks that his power is more important than us students, us CHILDREN being shot down one by one bang bang bang like FISH IN A BARREL LIKE SHEEP IN A SLAUGHTERHOUSE

like flies on a windshield

Because that’s how easy it is for him, and you, and everyone else to wipe away our problems

Being who we are no longer means being individual

It just means that you can use our depression as an excuse for your apathy

You tear at the seams of our carefully sewed façades and it seems as if no one seems to care one way or another one step to the other.

Maybe

Maybe

Maybe you will think about this poem for a day or two before going back to your daily life

Maybe even a week

Maybe you won’t at all

And you’ll go back to not caring, not loving, and not doing anything.

You pathetic, conniving, pretentious, apathetic, narcissistic adults

You leave us in the rust to die from tetanus because ‘the adults are speaking’

Maybe the adults should start acting less like 15-year-olds playing spin the bottle and using our delicately fabricates lives as their empty bottle of corona that they can throw about and twist however they please and stop acting like they have some ounce of empathy for us, but rather start acting like they could actually give a shit if we die tomorrow. Whether by the hands of our own or by those of another

I want someone to do a spoken word type thing of this so badly 

|my generation|

we are a generation of dreamers

sleepy warriors

fighting to perfect their broken reality

hoping for the best but preparing for the worst

we will change it for the better

this world

our home

and though we will be knocked down

we have each other

and we will always get back up

~e.m.

and we were supposed to be the saviors. the generation to fix it all. but they left us with a broken planet and no tools to fix it and then they sneered when we came to them, empty handed.

“you’re so privileged,” they chortle. “it’s because you’re always on your phone.”

we are the kids living in a nightmare. they say we’re numb to 9/11 but maybe that’s because what was the worst day for them could become just another thursday for us. school shootings every other day and a rapist on our Supreme Court but hey, that’s how it is, right? at least we have memes to tide us over until doomsday. this hellscape is somehow normal. our president says people should be deporting for kneeling during the national anthem and all we can is laugh at it. but we are no longer laughing because it’s a joke.

we’re laughing because we’re afraid.

afraid that the world is going to end before we even become adults, afraid that we’ll be plunged into another war because of a fucking tweet, afraid of shooters coming in through our doors and children being taken from their homes and the problem is that our fear is justified. that it’s real and it’s happening.

nearly everyone i know is queer, depressed, and/or sick of the adults in this world. sick of how 71% of our pollution is caused by 1% of the population. sick of how we can only sit here and listen to them tell us to take shorter showers because there’s nothing else we can do.

and fuck, have we tried to do everything we can. walk-outs, protests, boycotts. speak up and speak out, but it’s just too late. they’ve been digging underneath us this whole time and it’s only now that the floor’s collapsing that we see the pit. how it’s not that they’re not hearing us anymore. trust me, we’ve made sure they’ve heard. it’s just that they don’t care.

and suddenly all those dystopian futures don’t look so far away. you know, where people die in the streets because doctors refuse to see them. where people are silenced (shot, jailed, deported) for speaking out. sometimes I think I’ll wake up and everyone will be marching in rhythm.

they told us to save the world, but we never had a chance.

— on generation z