I'm watching VH1's "I love The New Millennium." I feel slightly dirty, more than a little sick and so fucking angry that I had to write this.

You know the show -- it's the one where comedians you've either never heard of or totally hate (with the exception of Michael Ian Black, but his continued participation in the series counts as major strikes against him in my book) talk about the "cultural milestones" of decades past. Well, the latest installment follows this formula exactly, except for one little difference -- THE DECADE HASN'T PASSED YET! How can you be nostalgic about something that hasn't ended yet? The show might as well be called "I Love The Present." Call me a stickler for the dictionary definitions if you must, but I expect there to be some actual passage of time before an era is remembered fondly. Yes, I remember the "famous" line from Noah Baumbach's Kicking And Screaming, where Chris Eigemann says that he's nostalgic for the conversation he's having now, but I don't think that the wits at VH1 re referencing the subtle brilliance of that concept. They're more like, "Hey, remember BlackBerrys? Remember texting? Remember "Moulin Rouge? Those things were something, right?"

Another thing: I'm watching "I Love '01" right now, and I just had to sit through Shana Moakler dissection of Shaggy's "It Wasn't Me." Believe me, you've never participated in a discussion with more heft and meaning than watching her repeat the lyric of the song a few times and exclaim "That's what guys are like." Huh. Must be why that song resonated so.

My point (and I do have one) is this: as I sit here, stewing and writing, the date is September 12, 2008. I'm watching a show that remembers the events (Winona Ryder shoplifting, the XFL) of 2001. What's missing, and why might its omission be a big deal? Maybe the flaming deaths of 3,000 innocent people that occurred seven years and one day ago. Remember Al-Qaeda? They were so crazy! The only mention of events of 9/11/01 is in relation to the benefit concert that was held some days later. And I'm sorry, but that treatment, set to a Coldplay song and featuring commentary by Chris Jericho and Luis Guzman, doesn't cut it for me.

Like I said, so fucking angry.

One could say that a nation's vibrancy, energy and overall health and strength can be measured by its cultural output. 

The Weimar Republic in 1920s Germany produced Thomas Mann. Postwar America gave the world JD Salinger and Tom Wolfe. Revolutionary France gave us Rousseau.

2008 America gave us the MTV Video Music Awards. If the aforementioned yardstick bears any truth at all, we're totally fucked.

I didn't watch the whole thing. I couldn't. But I watched enough to understand a few things about the generation that we can expect to hand the wheel of the ship of state to in not too many years.

1) No song makes it these days without at least one "featured" credit and liberal use of the vocoder. I didn't hear one natural voice among the nominated songs, not even from those performers who have made it on their voices. Overproduced and undernatural. If that's any indication of the future, we can expect to see the "RoboSing 3000" topping the charts sometime very soon. 

2) All the songs are gimmick songs, owing great debt to the looming, all-encompassing cultural legacy of such greats as Sam the Sham and whoever the hell sang "Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini." Honestly, is "I Kissed A Girl" that much different? And am I the only person who remembers THERE WAS ALREADY A SONG CALLED THAT? ABOUT THE SAME THING?

3) As Amelie Gillette points out in her indispensable The Hater blog at The AV Club and my lovely wife pointed out yesterday, the set looked like shit, as it always does. If your goal is to numb the young masses into believing that the music you chose to cram down their throats, hadn't you better shell out a bit more to make the thing look good? After all, if you're only go to show videos once a year, you'd better come correct.

4) Music today -- at least the music represented as "the most..." by MTV sucks today. I never thought I'd find myself being nostalgic for The Spice Girls and John Mayer's first record.

I'm too depressed by it to continue talking about it.

It's morning in Los Angeles.

I'm writing from the desk in my apartment at a time I would normally be at the restaurant I manage, getting through a lunch rush on my way to Nowheresville. But not today, because it's morning in Los Angeles.

I finally got the sack to say, as so many before have said, "Take this job and shove it; I ain't working here no more."

No, I didn't win the lottery. No, I haven't been scrimping and saving for years to take some time off and look for a better job. Instead, I said, "Fuck this. This job isn't taking me where I need to go. Time for me to take a leap."

It's been a while since I've done that.

I'm now a tutor, an assistant, and an aspiring writer. Again. And it feels good.

More to come.