Cracking Up

I guess the rumor of my crack-up has spread because a friend just sent me a copy of THE CRACK-UP, the posthumous document of F. Scott Fitzgerald's total meltdown.  I'm pretty sure F. never had to exile himself to his parents' house in the suburbs BUT I'm only just finished with the first chapter so who knows how low he will sink later.

It's impossible (to the point of triteness I know, SORRY) not to read the first essay in the book, Echoes of the Jazz Age, without feeling creeped out and unsettled by how familiar it seems--  the only seeming difference between now and the post-crash years being, duh, that at least in the 20's they had waited for the war to be over before they commenced with the drinking, sexing and insane consumption.  But they didn't have the internet in those days so we can use technological panic as the excuse for our own oblivious excesses, right?

"Now once more the belt is tight and we summon the proper expression of horror as we look back on our wasted youth.  Sometimes, though, there is a ghostly rumble among the drums, an asthmatic whisper in the trombones that swings me back into the early twenties when we drank wood alcohol and every day in every way grew better and better and there was a first abortive shortening of the skirts, and girls all looked alike in sweater dresses, and people you didn't want to know said, "Yes, we have no bananas," and it seemed only a question of a few years before the older people would step aside and let the world be run by those who saw things as they were-- and it all seems rosy and romantic to those of us who were young then, because we will never feel quite so intensely about our surroundings any more."