Pool conversation, school’s out, amid cigarette smoke, beer bottles and summer’s languid crawl. Conversations, opinions, drift to me like rain clouds floating down upon a picnic, disappointment grows within me even as I labor to make use of fresh perspective and burgeoning patience. From what nether hole comes this obsessive habit of quoting lines from movies? Is it new? Probably not, as there are only so many ways to engage in the cat-skinning activity. My Bill Murray is rusty but still workable, as explanation.

But now it’s different, says he.

They were talking, no chattering is how to say it, about a spate of Vietnam movies, you know the ones, splitting hairs about what lines were funniest, who said them and how they went, verbatim. Taking and making light of some seriously ironic scenes, racing past the latent meanings for the easily accessible manifest ones, they seemed preoccupied with the enormity of Platoon, the sheer terror and sadness. But not for the sake of terror and sadness. More for the clever turn of a phrase at someone else’s expense.

Harmless enough, one would guess. Two girls and two guys and that’s part of what was driving me crazy. I was trying to finish a novel set in 1828. But 1999 encroached upon my sensibilities with its middling, muddling maddening popular culture tinge, its unisex flavor, whose androgyny is to me hopelessly exaggerated, although some say it cleanses, whatever that means. This merging of sexes, ages and races into one teeming consumer ball renders it perfectly acceptable, nay preferable, for women to bandy about the same vulgarities as men, in equally nonchalant fashion. I make no political statements (on purpose) about roles and gender and I realize that women should be able to do anything they want to, although the shuffling of the lyrics to reveal "Anything you can do I can do worse" I hadn’t anticipated. My 1828 novel, full of formal dancing, formal dinners, decorum and style. Detractor’s answer: and people who didn’t bathe as much, and as much war and killing and sex as one historian can stand to recount. And all that tiresome tradition. Obstacles.

Point taken, for I realize that modern violence has no advantage save mass exposure via mass media on the violence of the Assyrian sacking of Babylonia. The sex and intrigue of the Clinton administration/masturbation, does it pale in comparison to the machinations of the Roman senate? Point well given.

Nonetheless.

It seems different. More pervasive. The "good" kids at your old high school are knee-deep in birth control and heroin, if hyperbole might be permitted. Too much, too fast. too little fear.

"No Fear," says the T-shirt. The back should say "No Clue."

There, it has been written, ostracize me, I care not, truly. Not only do I feel as if our cultural fiber has coarsened as the technological capacity has exponentially rallied, but the great rush to sensual gratification of age-old flesh now allows women to become as grotesque and banal as men were/are/will be. The double standard has been a casualty of liberation and yet I tend to follow George Will’s Newsweek essay of months past, the upshot of which was that chastity, or abstinence (we must acquiesce to the academia-led thrust toward genderless terms) is truly sexy. To the pool once more, for more movies (want to get 20-something attention today? use movies, it makes them horny, makes them listen, momentarily)...more movies, killing fields, heroin addicts, sex and rock ‘n’ roll. We, as were other less "civilized" generations and peoples, are titillated by what used to be called, frankly, sins. Tweaked by disaster, tragedy and bad news-do we heave a sigh of relief as we note the misfortune of others, marking our own precious lives as unscathed to date? Or do we embrace the violence, the screwing, the dishonesty?

I’ve no quarrel with death, it being the natural sum of the equation that brings life in the first place. And in my cultural journey I do not avert my gaze from death as it is offered to me in film, song or prose. However, I must be able to taste the symbolism, feel the power. I embrace the lessons which tragedy teaches, if there are any. I do not experience the secret sexual surge that I imagine many contemporaries internalizing spasmodically at such sorry spectacles as Natural Born Killers or Pulp Fiction. These phenomena do not register benignly in the field of my sensibility, they do not intersect remotely with the teaching of Jesus, or the Torah, or those of my parents. Let it be said now and the devil mobilize ye, hasty critics, secular soldiers of sober-minded modernity. Awful, realistic images of people shooting, people dying, bloody bodies, rape, deceit...these things make me sad. They scare me and the embolden me to live in fear of such sin. I admit they are a part of life and this is fact. Still, I do not welcome them. I do not see them as entertainment. I don’t find murder to be a laughing matter, as Goodfellas (or Goodfellows, not sure here, does it matter?) would have us believe.

Next time you’re watching a really violent movie, do this. Instead of watching the main characters doing the expiration act, insert your mother. Your spouse or significant other. Yourself. Try and shake it off. Put your girlfriend under a pile of gang-bangers, your mother in a foxhole in gory, glorious Vietnam with her brains slipping gracefully down the dirt slope, and then place yourself in the middle of a carjacking. Be a method actor, Brando.

Now, how do you feel?

Now for the supplication, for in any good exposition (premature perhaps, this self-critique) there is the lessening, matched against the original quickening, a juxtaposition for the sake of vague credibility and balance. Let the equilibrium ease onto the stage.

I digress.

I imagine that as these four everybodies at the pool grow older they will gradually evolve into more refined facsimiles of their former selves, coming to resemble their parents despite anguished cries and remonstrations to the contrary. As they shed subconsciously the invisible yoke of youth with its dearth of real responsibility, duty and self-control, they will find less and less palatable the steady stream of vulgarity which previously has sustained their impatient, impudent, imprudent lust for a taste of the waiting world. They will find that their unbridled passions have sprouted riders. One of the pool fools said, "I’m over 18, nobody can tell me nuthin’" and despite the fusillade of grammar correction exploding in some academic section of my brain, I had to laugh.

The urgency to fly will abate, the obsession with independence will fade, ease. The same fire which raged out of control, tearing across plain grasslands of humility, respect, dastardly conformity (called solidarity and community at a later date by many) and subtlety will be brought under control in time. For the vast majority of these cigarette-smoking, bottle-sucking characters the next decade will bring a nuanced, quiet downshift. They will not be as sure, as cocksure (a word which must be savored from time to time, indeed) and they will begin to second-guess (ah, calm reflection, RSVP) a diet of madness, mayhem and mirth of it all. They will wander from the radical 20s (the American radical is the European moderate, they tell me. The European radical is a skinhead, it seems, but what do we really know as truth?) into a sort of freefall.

As they wed, bed and engage in the procreative experiences they feared would come home to roost, they will visit the same hated fields of toil they currently deride as bureaucracy, business (invoking the dreaded "bourgeois" term as a blanket, that is if any of them have done serious reading yet). And they will find themselves guarded by the same horrid sentinel (the "Man" one supposes, although usage of that dried-up weapon is increasingly laughable).

They will return, or visit for the first time religion-instead of the church of the supermarket and mall they will return to the worship houses of their youth. The sojourners will start to understand, as they gaze into the innocent and beautiful eyes of their offspring, that what never seemed even mildly offensive in past days-what seemed "cool" and risky and clever-is truly vulgarity, frighteningly ingested by today’s advanced, nonchalant consumer. Previewing the demise of one’s culture will not at this point strike the fancy as a boffo notion.

For now, one cannot truly decide whether it is experience (or lack thereof) running the motors of the foul mouths around the pool, or character (or lack thereof). It is a question that will not be answered after a shower, another cold one and some more off-color musings, some more stabs at the dark side and the margin, the extreme and the blind turkey shoot that is identity formation.

So youth is wasted on the young, until they are beyond the pale of adolescence and can see the steps taken.

The prism turns and the scenes shift.

Or did the prism move at all? Did we not adjust our angle, from one of repose to one of urgency? Did we not put away our childish things only to discover the world there, our place in it, no matter how "not hip" or "normal," as it has always appeared to those who were prepared to see it? It happens to the best of us.

And in it’s own time.