The New Beach in Nebraska Isn’t Gentrified Yet
But it's only a matter of time.
“That’ll be $12.” I hold my breath as I stare at the barista, dumbstruck, and this overwhelming feeling crashes down on me like a dark wave. How the fuck does a latte cost $12?? I stand in front of an iPad on this brisk Sunday morning, examining every inch of its surface as I slowly breathe in the aroma and absorb the surroundings—the frothing milk, the generic indie music, the vibrations from machinery churning out another perfect cup—and I am presented with the choice of tipping 75%, 95%, or 125%. I sheepishly tap 75% and feel a pang of guilt as the barista shakes their head in disgust. The warm cardboard cup is situated between my hands, but my coffee maker at home has never passive-aggressively guilted me into forking over a tip.
There is no future, there is only me. I need to build my personal brand. I’ve been aiming for this artisanal international home cook aesthetic to complement my high-paying finance job, so I come across as successful and sophisticated. But everywhere I look—on television, on Uber Eats, on tourism promos, on memes, on home cooking groups, and especially on Instagram—there is increasingly some version of burger or burger derivative. The most recent of which is this hellish “Big Mac Taco.” Food content has this intense visceral quality to it now, everyone is caressing and fondling the meal in front of them—slapping it, stroking it, touching it, squeezing it to eject juices at the camera in a deeply unsettling fashion. Everyone is cooking burgers in the shade of a mountain in the Hindu Kush and using a stone to fry ground chuck in stunning 4K radiantly colored footage in artful, swopping Food Network cinematography complemented by high-fidelity ASMR-level burger sounds. These Anthony Bourdain wannabes cram their entire mouths full of high-octane burger stuff, loudly slurping and chewing, lips covered in sauce. Demonic, gleeful pornography.
I need to find my niche. Hand-poured candles. Third-wave coffee. Selvedge denim.
I also gawk at Elon Musk stans as if they’re circus freaks, incomprehensible that this dweeb is their choice for simping. The internet is full of the best tits in the world, first sons with massive hogs, singer-songwriters who always looks like they’re about to cry—there are so many better options to devote your time and dignity to. Elon stans are basically Cleveland Browns fans: They’ll waste their time and money on something incredibly dysfunctional and it will never make them happy. I suppose people need dumb hobbies. But Elon has the weirdest plastic surgery game. All his fillers are strangely placed and wandering around, his plugs are poor quality, and his chad jaw makes it look like his face is never done rendering. Maybe looking objectively awful is our generation’s Elizabethans blacking their teeth so people think they can afford a lot of sugar. It’s a wild intra-ruling class aesthetic based on no one ever telling you “no.”
I need to find my angel investor. Tune in. Turn on. Dropship.
I just bought a beachfront mid-century house in the hills of northeast Nebraska for about half of my eight-figure trust fund, and ChatGPT tells me my property value will skyrocket once Florida is underwater and the Marlins are forced to relocate to South Dakota. My crib is far away from the poor people causing the climate catastrophe, #doomsdaymindset. But after the National Guard kicked out all the locals with heat-seeking missiles, all my old haunts have been replaced by these generic “fancy” gastropubs with the corrugated tin roof interiors and “folksy” decorations with a hip, urbane tinge. Everything about it all feels so focus-grouped. An Erehwon opened down the street and my groceries this week included a Hailey Bieber strawberry smoothie, a spicy tuna poke, some buffalo vegan cauliflower, a Korean BBQ short burrito, and a mortadella burrata sandwich—all for a combined $350. Hipster PMC brains spill out onto the laminate like seeds onto clay soil; nothing grows here, but nothing ever rots. Erehwon is Nowhere reversed. The people who eat at these places are equally bland, somewhat wealthy white-collar professionals who seem hollow in this menacing, hard-to-define way. It’s as if capitalism became a person.
The neighborhood is being overrun with the excess and extravagant taste of pretentious posers; just horrible, gaudy McMansions popping up everywhere and asshole dads driving lifted white F-150s with their kids in the back seats dressed in Minions t-shirts and playing with Funko Pops. Everyone who can afford to live here is paranoid and haughty and their vibe is turning this place into just another self-induced suburban panopticon. They don’t see the miles and miles of pointless, angsty traffic crisscrossing the landscape, coating everything with carcinogenic particulate, people nervously tapping their fingertips on the steering wheel as they bake and sweat inside a disconnected metal box. They’re waiting to go to some place that does the thinking for them, the prefab red shades and muzak of Target, or the soft and unacknowledged dictatorship of the American workplace. Overworked middle managers brag gleefully about how many shots of hard liquor they gulp when they’re at home watching NFL Red Zone. A sort of frenetic calm belies the grim realization that they live in the service of some deep, unknowable machination that they assume to be a physical construct, like gravity. Terse platitudes become the ointment for our no-see-um, vapor-hot frustrations: It is what it is, Happy Friday, Another day another dollar, Tiger’s gotta eat.
The glitz and splendor of the Cinemark popcorn buckets. The supermarkets fuelled by steaming Iraqi guts run between a veritable panoply of dead foods such as Oreo™: Double Chocolate Bacon Fudge Crisp and refreshing Fanta: Hiroshima Green Tropical Katrina Cool Ocean Blast. It all fades away to blood-soaked linoleum, bodies in spaces steaming under the cold incandescence of our gluttony, making its face as a sin known in the Asian doctor kindly holding our aging white hands and telling us in Stanford-educated English: “You are prediabetic…” We become aware of the joys of dialysis. Police manhandle our dementia-ridden grandmothers for dancing naked in the street. Our children are bullied online until they attempt suicide. Our children are bullied within the Darwinist hellscape of American institutions, mauled and tortured by the crushing weight of unrealistic expectations in a world that acts more and more like a game that is only winnable by a certain Konami Cheat Code that remains unknown to us.
The formlessness and anomie of the Reagan Revolution opens up like the canyons of Zion. The waste and the casual cruelty, of class hatred and racial animosity, the dream of the white picket fence and happy, smiling babies turns into the steel gates outside the White House. Parapet snipers stationed on so-called Halls of Justice. The ADHD-plagued child who cries for another Crunch Wrap Supreme. It all falls apart on the 72” LED TV in front of us, and it all seems like it could be a reality show: Some redneck hoodlums poop in Nancy Pelosi’s chair and shriek TRUMP like monkeys at the Oakland Zoo. The USPS man just dropped the lien notice through the slit in the door. The dream becomes a gentle nightmare, the sort of nightmare that is accompanied more by a feeling of intense disquiet and malaise than by sheer, naked terror.
I need to indulge in my real passion—abstract art about the identity and privilege of others. Let’s make it big, from the plywood I bought from Home Depot. Drive it to Burning Man, and set it ablaze. Then I’ll inhale a cocktail of blow and ketamine and molly and ‘shrooms and mescaline and fuck a TikTok influencer while my girlfriend hooks up with Diplo in a hot air balloon.
Our obsession with apocalypse is a side-effect of our desire for apocalypse. Do not start a family. Do not save for the future. Be a good little piggie and march along to the next Black Friday sale because everyone is too busy pretending to be rich to get rich. Buy more organic produce. Buy more natural wine made exclusively from Black female producers. Buy more colored vinyl on Record Store Day. Buy more limited edition Supreme hoodie drops. The world is ending. It is capitalism’s fault and it is your parent’s fault.
Sitting on my rooftop for another faded sunset, the smog softly smothers an already oppressive landscape of concrete sprawl. I’m watching nukes rain from the sky with a girl I just matched with on Tinder while at the Orgy Dome in the desert. It is almost Christmas in Nebraska, and the unapparent balmy air is defined by endless 75 and sunny. As the world settles into sludgy, shrugging mediocrity, I am confronted with the aesthetics of a culture that cannot tell the truth of itself about anything. This narcotic crazy train refuses to derail, this locomotive hospice is filled with the dying brains of boomers who are raging politically while still pressing all the buttons that are keeping us strapped to this death chair.
Nothing matters. There is no future. There is only me.
Credit to
for coming up with the title and a special thanks for letting me use it.
Holy shit!
Google Forest bathing.
AHAH.
I though this was non fiction till I saw the line about Kids playing with Funko Pops.
I know kids dont play with things these days.