Amr! My little friend. There was a rumor going around that you had blown off your fingers with one of those little devices you build. I had a vision of you stump-fingered and frustrated.

I’m glad you’re back though. When you first dropped by, I was hoping for regular guest appearances. An angry, crazy muppet popping up from the floorboards periodically to spit and squeal in half-English and make the audience snicker.

No coincidence I suppose that I was reading Thompson at the very moment you stopped by. Perhaps indeed this was the phrase that conjured you up:

“What do you say” the Good Doctor was asking, “about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison … ?” And being the irascible old burnout that he was by then, he immediately answered: “…if a cool spring rain on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison scum in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation.”

He was talking about the generation – mine I suppose – that grew up in the 1980s.

Are you a child of the 80s Amr? I imagine so. Sad that, because in Egypt you didn’t even have TV worth watching. I guess it’s a good thing you still have your fingers.

But thinking more broadly of Egypt and things blowing up, it looks like a couple more kids from Boulak or Sharabeya or some other cinderblock shithole have jumped the tracks and done to some French school kids what the security services have been doing to them all these years.

What do you say about a generation that never knew the crystal blue lake at all, only the black poison scum that comes up out of the gutter every time it rains? Forced to learn mindless nationalistic nothings by rote in schoolrooms without windows while the crooked sons of sycophantic regime-trusties go to school in Europe. Working mindless jobs for bus fare and an ever-shrinking loaf of tasteless bread. And fucked with broomsticks by thugs in dirty uniforms when they protest.

There is not much left to a generation to whom even relentless masturbation is denied (notwithstanding the odd bit of pocket-pool action on the Metro when a foreign girl gets into the wrong car) by sheer population density and the highlight of the television season is a dreary Ramadan special that would put Jerry Lewis to sleep. One can only imagine how attractive the mantra of “two parts ammonium nitrate, one part hydrazine” must be to a priapic seventeen-year old contemplating another night huddled with seven siblings and the neighbors to watch Adel Imam worry about the embassy next door or the car thief down the street.

NB: if you’re nuts, and you submit a comment, I’ll edit it before I approve it. But I guess you already knew that, didn’t you cheesehead?