Dear Internet 2: The "Depressed Millennial" is the New Hippie

Dear Internet,

Some people actually bothered to read this. Why would anybody bother to read this? I didn’t even bother to proofread this. Alright, I guess people are just that bored. And you know, most of you people didn’t even comment on the depression stuff. “Oh, another depressed millennial. Sorry that sucks, but it’s nothing new.” Seems like the depressed millennial is the new hippie, the new beatnik, the new flapper. Just another motif of another new era; just a sign of the times. If things keep at it, we just may have a new American classic on our hands. “The Grapes of Inequity” or “The Millennials Abroad: Or the Old Systems’ Failure.” Oh, what about “The Old Man and the Disappointment?”

So it turns out more of you wanted to know why in Hell I would kick a puppy. Yeah, I get it, what kind of monster would do that? Put puppy kickers right on up there with Vlad the Impaler. Well, as it happens, I wasn’t always an animal abuser. In fact, I used to be a sweet, innocent little kid with a pet of my own. When I was five or so, I caught a frog in the backyard and brought it inside without my parents seeing me and put it in an empty fish bowl. The bowl used to be my mom’s ashtray, but she kicked the habit and put the bowl away forever. I put some dirt, some rocks, a few twigs and some grass in the bowl and decided to name the frog Gorf. Of course, my mom found Gorf in my room that night, but she didn’t really seem to care all that much. She actually wanted me to rename him Kermit, because you know, she’s part of that generation. 

My dad didn’t like me having a frog as a pet. Not because it was a frog, but because it wasn’t a dog. He hated any pet that wasn’t a dog and never really cared for animals in general either. Animals were one of three things to him: Dog, food, or pest. Gorf fell under the latter. But my mom convinced him to let me keep him. I don’t wanna know how she managed that.

Later on that summer, my dad came home with a puppy he’d bought from the pet store. It was a Great Dane puppy he named Reagan, and I should’ve probably prefaced the previous paragraph by saying my dad only bought Great Danes. In fact, if you had a dog any smaller than 50 pounds, you had a cat. Seeing as how I was about five years old at the time, I thought Gorf and Reagan would be friends. So why did I kick Reagan? Because when I held Gorf out in front of him, he chomped down on Gorf. The kick was meant to force Reagan to spit Gorf out, but all it did was make him bite down. He spit Gorf out, a blob of brownish-green and red. I never had a pet after that.

Check back each Wednesday for the next nine weeks for the latest in Mark Shelley’s Dear Internet series.