THE ANXIOUS GENERATION ATTENDS A FOUR-WEEK SUMMER CLASS by J. Bradley Minnick

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WEEK 1

We are part of the anxious generation. The anxious generation knows no bounds, except for ourselves. We know we alone control our experiences and decisions. That is, we don’t believe the decisions we make matter. We don’t believe the decisions we make will make a difference.

We say, “They stole our futures,” not once, but often. We can’t help but be anxious. Our emotions know no bounds. We hate our anxiety but invoke it often. We tell our professors way too much information, withholding nothing. Everything sets us off—the ringing of a text in the middle of the night; sirens heading toward what is a tragedy; the flickering of lights in a locked classroom; our thin key cards that don’t work. We can’t find our classrooms—asking strangers produces that you-should-know look. Should we come late to class? Our other classes overlap, and our professor is really a pill and has strange eyebrows. We don’t feel comfortable giving him our phone numbers even if he can easily locate them in some information management system.

We absolutely hate talking on the phone; email is better but too formal; we prefer to text because then we’re the sender—we can control our replies, although we hate waiting for the replies from others. We watch the three dots while others are in the midst of texting. Wonder what they are writing—what they are deleting. The sender is composing a message, and then suddenly it disappears.

Like the characters in our assigned play Our Town, we ask what does a life mean? What did we accomplish? But it is far from the turn of the century, and this is not Grover’s Corners but a four-week summer English course at a university, and there is not a stage manager to move in and out of the scenes—in fact, there is no narrator at all to guide us—at least that is what we remember from the AI summary. We are lost. Above all, we are anxious. We readily admit it. This class is what they call upskilling. We’d upskill more on the Blackboard thread, but right now we need a mental health break.

WEEK 2

We want to get on with this thing they call “real life” but still fancy ourselves stuck in the middle because there is an ending and no end—to our anxieties.

And what if we threw a party and we invited everyone we knew and no one came or brought gifts? And what if we threw a war and everybody came with balloon animals and firecrackers? And what if the Walmart delivery driver can’t find our dorm room and leaves our grocery orders outside someone else’s door and drives away, never texting—suddenly decides he hates his job and just quits?

Our groceries wait for us. We can’t find them because they were left somewhere in Building X—our dorm. All we have is a pic of a random door with sacks in front. We walk around aimlessly trying to locate them, but Building X is a big place. That’s just the way it is, but we hear it hasn’t always been this way, and we’re certain we don’t like the sound of the past—like the footfalls, terrible, of our terrible upstairs dorm neighbor, who must weigh 800 pounds and who likes to drop what sounds like bowling balls on the floor and yell to raise high the roofbeams carpenters at all hours.

We want to go upstairs, knock on the door, complain, but know our neighbor won’t have the decency to open the door and will yell right through it. So we walk around with blankets over our heads and bump into the furniture.

In an anxious world, fear rules, and we can’t take anything for granted—taking things for granted is how one gets into a terrible bad fix; taking things for granted is not questioning assumptions, but who really has time to question assumptions when the news is on 24 hours and time moves fast like the endless scroll on the bottom of our screens—a scroll of bad news that never ever ends even on a good day?

WEEK 3

We believe in serendipity, like when we show up for week three of our English class and Professor Eyebrows asks, “Can we attend to more than one thing at a time?” And, because we believe the professor has directed this question directly at us, and it is both personal and pointed, thrown explicitly in our direction, we stare at the ground. If we can’t see him, then logically he can’t see us.

We’re late, again, and believe we have been singled out. It’s not our fault that the elevator doors are locked, that we have to walk up the five flights of ramps. Collectively, we hate this building. The architect was a New Brutalist and built what looks like a parking deck with ramps and concrete and no windows. Our keycards don’t work. Won’t let us into the building. We can’t find the proper half-floor, and Professor Eyebrows insists on changing rooms every week, and we’re too anxiety-ridden to ask or not to ask.

So we run up the ramps, and we open every broken door on every half-floor and finally find the class sitting outside in a circle filled with ecophobia. And now this posed question about attending to more one thing at a time? We are certain, upon reflection, this question was meant for the circle. While struggling with our backpacks, we drop our laptops on the ground while trying to articulate a response. First we say, “No,” and then “Yes,” and then “Maybe,” and then, “Don’t know,” and finally, “Don’t give a rat shit because I think my laptop is broken!” and, “Did I say that out loud?” And then the fall back that we promised we would never say, “Professor Eyebrows, you’ve been asking this question all semester, and we don’t know. We will never know. We don’t care. We will never care.”

WEEK 4

We’ve convinced ourselves that we are the ghosts of Foucault, speaking from the dead but not dead yet. We’re taking the final exam—done synchronously in real time. The panopticon awaits us: we are disciplined; we are punished. And what does our Professor do but send another Blackboard question our way before we can manifest a satisfactory response to the first question about attending in the thread: “What is news?”

What is this, the New Hollywood Squares? And who are we supposed to be, the new Paul Lynde? And, being the new Paul Lynde, we should be able to produce a witty retort, but unlike those asynchronous classes where we can use AI to introduce ourselves to the thread, this question about news is real, and it seems that real people in the real world are staring at us. Their gazes are placid. Won’t let us go. They await some kind of response. If only we could crawl inside the digital world and produce a good response. If only we could control our nerves and our sweaty hands that would tatter the pages if this was a bluebook exam. If only we could control our thoughts enough to slow down. We attempt to compose something mildly erudite on the spot and send it to the Prof., and our thumbs are going a mile a minute, and we accidently send a porn-site link, and then our AI prompt, again accidentally. And, well, we’re watching Professor Eyebrows examine the responses in real time, and there we are in digital time, and the final exam. And we’re done and we’re done.

Week 5

So, we need to tell our fathers and mothers that we have been kicked out of college. That we are a hot mess. That the professor’s weird eyebrows gave us nightmares. That the ramps in Building X were too steep. That the Prof. made us go outside. And, if the truth be told (and it never is) the Prof. said after reading our AI responses. “STOP—JUST STOP—I HAVE STOPPED READING HERE!” Then, he hit the dash cursor————-and signed off.

And, we tell our fathers and mothers, college was and still is just too much: the nerves, the morning heart palpitations, the every-morning anxiety. The computer broken. The VPN never worked. The porn site was evidence, so said the Dean of Students despite our protestations that Blackboard worked improperly. The AI prompt sealed the deal. Professor Eyebrows used three AI checkers and sent the paper through AI to check itself. A nightmare. Like Kafka. Like Borges. Like Munch. “We don’t need this,” we say.

What do our mothers say? “The syllabus was not paper?”

What do our fathers say? “You mean you’re not handing papers in by hand?”

Together, we all sit down in the living room and listen to our fathers and our mothers.

Our fathers say: I’m telling you, just letting you know that everyone—positively everyone—hates their upstairs dorm neighbors. Sadly, that’s just the way it is—the way that it will always be.

And our mothers say: And there’s the wisdom in knowing the difference.

And our fathers say: Listen, disappearing is out of the picture. And failing is giving up.

And our mothers say: No failing is just another opportunity to learn.

And our fathers say: Your mother and I have known you before your life. Hell, we made you. Now listen—hear us—know what we’re telling you is true.

And our mothers say: But sometimes we know as much as we try, and try as much as we know, and the truth just won’t break through or perhaps it is the other way and we just can’t let go of it.

And our fathers say: Listen to us now like your life depends on it, like you’ve never listened before, as if what we’re telling you is the only thing that matters. Remember when you were a little boy, and like all little boys you would do something terrible and wrong and would blame the monster inside of you later?

And our mothers say: Remember when we asked you what were you thinking? Remember your response?

And we say: Attending to more than one thing at time makes us anxious?

And our fathers would say: Don’t talk to your mother that way.

And our mothers would say. Why me?

And we would say: Why you?

And our mothers would say: How could you?

And our fathers would say: Why us all!

And we would say: What is news?

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AUTHOR BIO:

J. Bradley Minnick is a writer, public radio host and producer, and a professor of English at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. He has written, edited, and produced the one-minute spot “Facts About Fiction,” and Arts & Letters Radio, a show celebrating modern humanities with a concentration on Arkansas cultural and intellectual work and can be found at artsandlettersradio.org. He has published fiction in Toad Suck Review, Burningword Literary Journal, Literally Stories, Inklette Magazine, the GroundUp, Cleaver, Twelve Winters Journal, East of the Web, Litbop Art and Literature in the Groove, Rural Fiction Magazine, Café Lit, Potato Soup Journal’s “Best of 2022” anthology, and Southwest Review.

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WHY WE CHOSE TO PUBLISH “The Anxious Generation Attends a Four-Week Summer Class”:

Author J. Bradley Minnick’s piece is one of those not-quite-a-story pieces that hit us just the right way because it was different and in a way does tell a story, with conflict.

We liked it because it’s very contemporary and does an excellent job of painting the anxieties of the current generation. And we liked it because it’s written in the rare first-person-plural viewpoint that adds a freshness to it. The perspective works here to great effect because it gives the piece a collective feel, even though we know it’s a single narrator speaking for a group.

We commend the author for the interesting perspective, the subtle touches of humor throughout, and the well-placed reference to Our Town. And let’s not overlook the last several lines that build to that unexpected final line to create the perfect cap to the piece.

(We’ll leave interested readers to look up the significance of the reference to Michel Foucault mentioned in Week 4.)