Who said the Swedes were allowed to make movies?

I had no idea that those fine folks who delivered unto the world those delicious Swedish Fish also made movies. I just got through watching The Seventh Seal, which is about neither numbers nor hairless aquatic dog-like creatures (as far as I can tell), but quite interesting nonetheless.

I had the night off work tonight. My first Friday night off since the end of January--wow. I'm wow'ing because I actually did work tonight, but only for three hours or so. It feels like I didn't work tonight, let's put it that way.

The Athens Twilight Criterium bike race / festival is this weekend, so downtown was absolutely ridiculous tonight. They blocked off about half the streets and set up beer gardens and stages and such. Pretty crazy town I live in. Tomorrow night I'll be at work, and I'm almost glad. As much fun as it would be to see the race taking place quite literally at my doorstep, I'd rather not deal with the crowds. That is, the loud drunken buffoons looking for an excuse to get more belligerent and hopefully not stumbling off the sidewalk onto the street where the bikes go whizzing by at 40 mph.

We are a strange generation. I don't even like such distinctions, as much fun as they can be. That said, we are a strange generation. I suppose when I say that I'm talking about the so-called Generation-Y. We're not quite gen-x'ers anymore, and they're going to have to distinguish between us and the next group of kids, the current infants through 15-years olds. They will be the generation who grew up with the internet, the ones who don't know life without e-mail and instant messaging and pop-up ads. This may sound like a strange distinction to make for a generational divide, but I'm right, no matter what the goofy sociologists say some day.

That said, that said, we are a strange generation. We are college-educated because that is what we are supposed to do after public high schools finish babysitting us. We grew up watching twenty-five-year-olds portray us as sixteen-year-olds in bad television teen drama. Half or more of us grew up with only one of our actual parents in the house, and most of us are thankful for that fact at this point. Now we are at college and we (or most of them) go to bars packed so full of flesh you can't move in any direction without making some very special new friends. Here we get loaded to the point of falling down stairs and just plain down, so drunk that the only thing we remember the next day is our name and how many times we vomited last night. We have turned popular music into some really awful shite, and attempted, at least as much as predecessors, if not more, to eliminate any notion of learning from what even fairly recent history has to offer.

But we too will one day rule the world. We will make the art that changes what art means. We will declare the great american novel dead, and we will rewrite our own history before anyone else has a chance to figure us out.

I have a lot to say about this, and in a much more specific way, but I'm being asked to be done with this, and it's bedtime and all that.

Goodnight.