Quicksand

Gen X was right after all.

They trained us to fear quicksand. They laughed at us when we did. But we were right.

We knew. Eating Rice Krispies drowned in milk poured from a carton with a face of a missing child on it — we knew. Snap, crackle, and pop; stop, drop, and roll; hook, line, and sinker — we knew. The most entertaining shows and movies warned of quicksand. Labyrinth, a tale of a secret world where predators steal children; Scooby-Doo, the story of criminals in obvious masks; The Princess Bride, a woman’s guide to outwitting abductors; The Never-Ending Story, the saga of the Trump regime.

We watched our heroes sink while adults abandoned them and everyone screamed “Quicksand!” but never drained the swamp — and we knew.

“Gen X Fear of Quicksand” was a quirk that other generations mocked. Our TV-addled minds, scrambled like a brain on drugs, had learned to fear the wrong things: quicksand, the Soviet Union, nuclear war.

Long-distance fears: nearby fears were too hard to handle. Who do you want to answer the phone at 3 am? the politicians intoned. Not parents who need to be reminded by TV ads at 10 pm that they should know where their children are, we answered.

Those parents grew up to be the political gerontocracy: absentee parents of a latchkey nation.

It’s ten o’clock — do you know if your Senator is dead or alive? Anyone answering in that old Kentucky home?

* * *

I would write something meaningful, but my mind is on quicksand. I would write something from my heart, but my heart fears quicksand. Greedy quicksand, making me want to hold in pain so that it doesn’t get vacuumed and vomited by AI.

AI is quicksand. It sucks up land and water, leaving us marooned and unmoored. Villains line the battlefield with quicksand. We thought the battlefield was our backyard. We thought the internet was a place to play. But it was quicksand.

Sometimes I read a print book because a print book can’t read me back. It leaves me feeling like I won a war — a war I waged on myself, because I live on digital quicksand. I built my home here thirty years ago, when it was fertile soil.

Time is an hourglass of quicksand.

In the 20^th century, we grew up surrounded by small things designed by human hands left in public places: posters, packaging, paraphernalia. We could hold them, which meant we could hold them in disdain. We thought the great sin was materialism. But materialism still had material. You could trace its roots.

A human thought up that silly slogan, a human wrote that jolly jingle. A human took the hard road to manipulate your mind. Their words still echo: catchy and clear, no quicksand here. Words that sold the most banal objects as the most exciting thrills. Now human words seem soothing by default, regardless of what they say.

We remember when people tried to sell us something instead of selling us.

We remember when the internet felt like a reprieve: a place where you built the architecture, and your enemies lacked the tools to break it, and you wrote with carefree curiosity instead of checking boxes. We were too busy discovering each other to imagine anyone merging us into an indistinguishable mass. How could they, and more importantly, why would they?

The thing about quicksand is that it gets everyone to shut up at once.

They shut up even while they’re talking, because their words are lost in quicksand. Quicksand waits in the open for people to fall. What happens to them afterward stays secret. Victims are absorbed into poisoned soil. Quicksand doesn’t give a warning or leave a trace. Quicksand is made of leftover people.

Quicksand devoured chronology, the clock of social media. We no longer know what happened, much less when or where or why. “Who” is a mutating protagonist, constructed by operatives and bot farms and imposters. Your humanity is decreed by robots. Prove you are human, demands the captcha. I pronounce you AI, says Pangram, after reading your fourth-grade essay on quicksand.

Over a half century, the Quicksand Economy transformed from tabloid newpapers to cable infotainment to reality TV to online influencers to AI facsimiles. Young people grow up longing to be a brand because it looks like job security. But there is no security in being post-human. Brands are for cattle, and that’s what the elite want: self-branding cattle, self-selecting fresh meat.

Gotta press the flesh, the politicians said. It was so literal, all that flesh that the Epstein class pressed, all that Gen X/millennial voiceless flesh, never meant to be heard, much less believed. All that flesh growing old enough to say “Me too” at the exact moment their personhood fell into mechanical doubt.

* * *

Modern life is standing at a gas station sink with your hands under a motion-activated faucet waiting for water that doesn’t come. Am I a ghost, you wonder, waving your hands. Your palms look the same: a heart line, a head line, a story.

Or is everyone else a ghost, and that’s why they don’t recognize humans anymore? When did they decide this, you wonder. You look at the mirror and wonder how many people expect to see a filtered image out of habit. The powerful won’t filter contaminants from your water or food, but they will filter faces until they tell no tales.

I was going to write about war, but I wrote about quicksand. US wars are quagmires, and a quagmire is the last step before quicksand. That’s why they prepared Gen X with all that helpful entertainment. Americans born at the end of the Vietnam War grew up to fight the wars of the adults who never noticed if they were around. The 21^st century was quicksand: Iraq, Afghanistan.

Now Israel, Iran, Russia, Ukraine, the US and more are merging into a mega-war run by robots. They used to call these World Wars. They used to call people on the phone. The most common call I get today is from someone named “Scam Likely.”

* * *

Gen X was right to fear abductions and the Cold War and nukes, albeit for bad reasons. We had the right characters and the wrong motives. We saw the puppets and not the strings. We had a childhood puppet president, one explicitly outed as a puppet in a Genesis video, and we still couldn’t understand the end goal.

Until AI rolled along and we were left bridging centuries. Half our life in an analog world, half our life in a digital world — and an interloper, AI, which threatens to annihilate both. Which threatens, through its insertion in surveillance and weapons technology, to annihilate everything. The good things, the bad things, the stupid things, the human things.

Before his death set off the apocalypse in January 2016, David Bowie, star of Labyrinth, sang a song called “Quicksand”:

Don’t believe in yourself/Don’t deceive with belief/ Knowledge comes with death’s release/ Ah-ah-ah-ah…”

Bowie didn’t tell us we’d be alive to watch the extinction racket. That we’d watch it like children, fearing quicksand, wondering how it came so common. Quicksand was supposed to catch you by surprise and make you scream for help. It was not meant to be entered like a goddamned swimming pool.

People are giving up on being human. It’s too hard. The filters that hide faces are made from scars. That’s the meat of AI technology: scraped flesh from fellow humans, molded until it’s unrecognizable, slick like plastic skin. No record of pain means no accountability. No ownership of words means no proof.

We are told that to acknowledge the scars, to grieve the wound, is to be “left behind”. The people diving headfirst into quicksand embrace this philosophy.

The rest of us hide our scars for other reasons. We are afraid they’ll take them away. Those inquiries, those injuries, are our evidence.

* * *

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Not quicksand, just an unfiltered photo by me. The Apostle Islands, 2025.