Blake b.1987: “My tattoo is faded now, but you can make out the letters — that there were letters. See, there’s the ‘N’ from ‘FUN’ It says ‘I HAD FUN ONCE. IT WAS AWFUL.’ And there’s a picture of a cat.”
Jerica b. 1985: “I told them, I said, you don’t need to biopsy it and they said, ‘Well, who has a tattoo on their finger?’ And I tried to tell them, I said, ‘It’s a little mustache, see, you put it up to your lip and you have a little mustache.’ But they insisted. So they take a sample and a couple of seconds later they’re like all, ‘Welp, it’s not a cancer’ and I’m like, ‘No the s-word.’ Then they write me up for oppositional-defiant conduct.”
Nirvana b. 1992: “’On fleek.’ It meant when… when…”
Mason b. 1983: “And bacon. We’d put it on everything. We didn’t know what it was doing to us. Nobody did. You can see, from my waist down, it’s a lot of tubes. That there is my stomach, one of them, and this tube is supposed to be a pancreas.”
Kaylee b. 1988: “One of my grandkids, 7Adam I think, gave me a datacube of all my old Instagrams. This was… it was long before that thing people can do now, with the… I was quite the big shot in my day. 17,000 followers. And here, here I am saying ‘Artisan Toast at the Red Door’ then this little symbol here then ‘blessed.’ After all this time I can still recall that it was burnt. Practically charcoal.”
Blake b. 1987: “And this one here, it’s just a blue and green smear now, but in the summer of twenty fifteen this tattoo was getting me to the ‘Chill’ part of ‘Netflix and chill.’ That was what we used to call it, you know, when we would — I don’t know the word you use for it now — copulate.”
Kyle b. 1989: “You’d take a picture of a cat, you’d take any picture, didn’t have to be your cat, and you’d put a caption over it. In text. White and black letters.”
Nirvana b. 1992: “When somebody’s game was ‘On point’ they were… I think it was where…”
Mason b. 1983: “Pulled pork. There was a time, I think sometime in the tens, when we’d put pulled pork in everything. Nobody thought to ask what it do to people in the long term, over generations. And quinoa. Today you’d be arrested.”
Cassidy b. 1986: “And I remember I cried. I cried so hard. They were at a wedding. And his wife was pregnant. Then ‘the Lannisters send their regards.’ I can’t even — can we just stop for a moment?”
Blake b. 1987: “This scar, this was the only tattoo I had removed, back in the ‘40s. I got it in the twenty-tens and it was a rasher of bacon. Once we found out I couldn’t walk down the street with it in good conscience, I got rid of it. I would have been strung up.”
Joshua b. 1989: “And if somebody criticized these games, well what we’d do is we’d call the police in their town and we’d say that they were terrorists or some such, and the SWAT team would come. You have to understand that back then you just couldn’t say that “video games,” that was what we called them, were sexist. So we’d call SWAT teams on them. It was funny until somebody died.”
5Sarah b. 2051: “Grandpa ate a lot of unregistered pig-substance. Multiple-source verified. Eighty-six percent cumulative damage according to subject-expert verification. Subjective: you can still see slight brain activity if you play Deafheaven loud enough.”
Miles b. 1984: “I remember when ten dollars would get you a whole bar of Mast Brothers chocolate. Twenty dollars and you could see a movie. You couldn’t touch it or smell it or be any of the characters. You just got to look at it.”
Brandon b. 1985: “For eight hours at a time you’d just sit there, just watching, then it would ask you: ‘Do you want to continue watching The Mindy Project?’”
Cassidy b. 1986: “9-11 was bad but… they were at a wedding, and Walder Frey had shared bread and salt with them. This has triggered me. I’m sorry.”
Nirvana b. 1992: “The nurses say that I don’t remember much because of somebody named Molly. But ‘On fleek’, that was… I think it was Snapchat.”
Blake, b.1987: “The angry cat, the sad cat, I don’t know what it was called, it had a disease. And its name was… I remember it being something “-ableist.” But we all loved that cat.”
Brandon b. 1985: “I remember when the Internet was just on computers.”
Kaylee b. 1988: “I remember when this was all above water.”