fwriction

Because I’ve been thinking about Long Island a lot lately, and perhaps even taking a trip there this weekend, today’s Story of the Day, from David Hollander:

“Summer. Blinding, blistering, suffocating summer. On Long Island, middle Long Island, west of the vainglorious Hamptons and east of any bonafide Manhattan affiliation, on this Long Island of housing developments and strip malls, of American Dreams flayed across the blanched sod of half-acre rectangles, here all summers are such, as far back as anyone remembers. Which, after all, is not very far. This island’s heritage is a generation old, maybe two, and no older. It’s a land of local immigrants, the expatriates of New York’s outer boroughs: Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx. This Long Island has no history, no antecedents, and these smothering summers of mosquito plagues and rainless humidity are the birthright of the younger generation, the true claim-holders of an already-failed project, that lower-middle-class quest to conquer anonymity, to dip a pan in the river, to take a shortcut, to hope like only the hopeless can. This younger generation, rife with all of the expected adolescent cliques and stereotypes, ripe with sexual desire and its blind and feverish directives, these are the frontiersmen and women competing to pitch flags, to make this island their own, to find meaning in it.”