I’m sitting down to write a fictional blog post from the future from the point of view of a Boomer complaining that society sucks now that everyone under 50 has died from H1N1. We were saved by all the lard Mom used all the time back in the ’50s but the organic food obsession killed the children of the hippies!

But I can’t. I have no idea how Boomers think. Do a little Method exercise with me: Remember what it was like when The Beatles got big? Remember 30 years later when John Lennon died? Remember Woodstock? Remember Nixon? Remember The Summer of Love? Remember Altamont? Remember the first time you heard Jefferson Airplane on LSD? Remember Vietnam? Remember what marijuana used to be like, you know, before it was good? Remember, as Hunter said, when the wave broke and rolled back?

Waaaaaaaay too much info. Much love to Demetri Martin et. al. for his “let’s play our parents!” dressup game:

I just don’t understand those guys, I’m too drunk on the mythology. I couldn’t bring any reality to it without WAAAAAAAY too much research, and I just wanted to bang out something quick. This is the kind of thing that people turn into books.

It’d be like asking a Boomer what it was like to fight Hitler. Mostly they just mythologize their parents (Saving Private Ryan, etc., which is why Tarantino says WWII movies from the 50s and 60s were so much more fun). I’d have to design a specific character, starting with his parents, read the Wikipedia year articles for every year of his life, and then write from THAT point of view. Way too hard.

The idea started as writing from the point of view of one of the last survivors of this generation, but they already made Children of Men and survival horror sucks.

The way I figure it: If we all died there’d be no more Internet, just email and some rotting, unused Infrastructure 2.0. Online banking, that stuff. Online poker would be easier. All those cheques they’ve been writing on our future to pay for social security and social medicine would bounce. Most markets, world wide, would just collapse. Insurance, including retirement investments, would be both unaffordable and useless because of a lack of new payees.

On the bright side though: No more babies on airplanes. No more babies anywhere really.

Anyway, here’s the map. Far from the one or two cases when the thing started a year ago, the numbers of this beast surprised me: