How Millennials Killed Me

From our latest issue, Nonsense Loves You

By Gisela Factora 

Art by Beth Foster 

Art by Beth Foster 

First, they came for the movie business. Then they came for bar soap. Then they came for Mr. J. Crew himself.

But I never could have imagined that they would come for me. Me, a regular guy with an office job. A wife, two kids, house in the suburbs with a picket fence, an affair on the side with Nell the secretary, the whole shebang.  Life was perfect—perfectly safe, perfectly ordinary, perfectly boring.

That is, until I found the pink slip lying on my desk one day. Initially, fear gripped me—who would bring home the bacon? Not the gluten-free, free-range, tofurky bacon, or whatever it is you cucks eat instead of real meat. I’m talkin’ the cheese, the moo-lah, the money.

But when I took a closer look, I found that losing this job was the least of my problems. You see, this slip of paper was not just any shade of pink. No, it was millennial pink. And it said, in print, presumably because you kids have no respect for the art of cursive these days, “You’re next.”

Genuine fear ran through me this time, chilling me straight to the bone, kind of like how it felt to hike 5 miles uphill in the snow to school in the winters of my boyhood, a sensation which today’s kids will never know. I didn’t know what exactly was in store for me. Back in my day, if you wanted to kill someone, you needed to get down and dirty and really put your backbone into it. Or put something into someone else’s backbone, as it were.

But nowadays, anyone can Amazon Prime themselves an assassin off the Deep Web with the press of a button. Boom, you’re dead, while the person or persons you’ve wronged have barely had time to exit out of the application. Is this not classic millennial laziness reminiscent of the box-wine boom and/or the mason jar revival? Have these youngsters no respect for the sommelier’s motto:  “Born in bottle/ Killed in glass/ Sip,sip,sip, don't drink it fast!

Anyway, Rent-an-Assassin or not, all I knew for certain was that I was in danger, and I had to run, lest the millennials strike me down with the swiftness with which they brutally murdered Buffalo Wild Wings.

So I made my preparations. I came home like I did every night, shoved my wife’s specialty down my gullet, and then prepared for dinner. Broccoli cheese casserole—an American classic. A respectable green vegetable dish, unlike that accursed dish of the millennials—avocado toast. Except avocado is apparently a fruit? That’s so confusing. It’s biologically a fruit. It can’t just pretend to be a vegetable. These…. crazy liberal millennials and their complete disregard for the god-given binary of fruit and veg.

I told my family goodnight, told them that I was going to be up for a bit longer doing some reading. From real books, I said pointedly to my kids. Not from a Kinder, or whatever the fuck they’re called. No ma’am, in this house we only stocked real books. Could e-books be spread across the coffee table to make us appear cultured? Could e-books gather real dust on the decorative bookshelf? Nah. Nothing could truly replicate the experience of owning actual, physical, paper books, and never actually reading them.

So of course, now was no different. I didn’t read. I packed. A few days’ worth of clothes, some food. I didn’t know how long I’d be gone, or how many provisions I would need, but I knew I had to leave—especially since, as I was packing, I discovered yet another millennial pink slip nestled in my clothes. I didn’t bother to read it. Merely the shade was enough to strike fear into my heart, and I got the message—run.

So I ran. And I’ve been running now for days, weeks—I’m not sure. Time is a blur, especially since millennials killed watches. But either way, I’m running low on supplies. I’ve been wearing the same argyle sweater for god knows how long. I’ve been cooped up in this motel room for god knows how long. And I can hear the Millennials outside, taunting me with their cries of “hey what’s up you guys” as they livestream the door to my room, biding their time until I run out of food, or willpower…

I think…. I think that time is now. Millennials mowed down diamonds, marriage, the Canadian tourist industry, and god knows what else. I, a lone man, don’t stand a chance against them. To my wife: if by some miracle you ever end up reading this, please don’t ever tell our kids that their dad was majorly cucked by the snowflake generation. Tell them I died a heroic death, like I went out fighting a bear or some sick shit like that. Tell them that my death was, as the kids say, “turnt AF,” and really ham it up if you have to. If possible, give those binches some serious tea to spill. I love you, and I’m sorry if you read that part up there about my sleeping with Nell in the same bed where our family was made, and I've been shot by a gun.