we [clarification]

I watched Rent (the film version) two years
and two nights ago and either:

The bohemian romance of New York
is a clever fiction, a lie we

[Generation X]

tell ourselves in an attempt to grapple
with the fact that we

[Americans]

live in a nation where the indomitable efficiency of
interstates and television has obliterated the
peculiarities of geographic separation. We

[artists]

loathe to believe this, and write musicals
and songs and books

[and blogs]

pretending it isn't so. We

[would-be critics]

watch with a mix of terror, excitement, and
trepidation as a quilt emerges from our collective
musings - a quilt pieced together from pop culture
references, allusion, consumption, cleverity,
pathological irony, and non-historicized personal
experience. We

[the tragic curious]

are left to wonder if it was ever so, or
if it was only a dream we

[the unreformed romantics]

invented in an attempt to keep
from shivering in the night;

the pastiche quilt of post-modernity makes for a poor bedfellow.

OR

I

[the author]

wrote the above in an attempt to
distance myself from the sadness I

[the human]

felt.