Golden ash...grey beer. The scene blurred. He looked around. Shook his head. 'Don't be ridiculous', he thought. Golden beer...grey ash tumbling into it. Sounds around him took on a pattern. A chant? They were all saying something, weren't they? Sigh. 'I must.'

            Blurring edges of a bed swam into view. Silence? Really? He passed out. As he lay there, he didn't think any more. He didn't want to. Someone was still talking. It was a girl. Fog rolled in again. 'It's Gaya', he remembered. She was drunk; he remembered that too. Gaya had launched into a monologue at no one in particular: "It's not us. We're not them and we're not the problem either. Maybe, at times like these, we really cannot focus!" she giggled at the thought, at the lack of focus. "That's why they think we're worthless. Because we have fun! We live. Maybe we're too grown up for ourselves. And maybe we're a little ahead of our age...but really, are we all that crappy?"

            His head seemed to lighten momentarily. 'We're not wasted. We're not saints. We're not sinners. We are...' he thought.

            It's all true. Both sides of the coin are true. We are what they say we are. We are what we think we are. Dedicated and driven: definitely. We're passionate and animal in our 'go get it' attitude. It's not like we're worthless. We're not. We may be other things but we're not worthless. Maybe we don't share ideals with our parents. Maybe we don't share beliefs with our grand-parents. Maybe we're morally bankrupt in comparison to the 'youth' of fifty years ago. Maybe.

            No one denied that everyone's playing out a sham. Everyone's running a con. Not just  the suave MBA grad with the money that his father ground out of life; not just the skank with the string of boys that she tags along with her, to boost her ego and then some; not just the plain Jane and not just the emo-geek. Every one runs scam. The old men that rule the country and the old women that preach a distant morality that no one has practised for a thousand years. No one is as perfect as they want to be. And we're no different.

            Clarity. He had made his argument inside his head. He lifetd his eyes to the doorway. There was a lot more light outside than here, in this dim room, with the babbling girl. He rose to make a move to the door. He wanted to spell out what he had thought of in this moment of drunken revelation. 'What the hell,' he fumed, 'they're all on my side anyway'. Silence inside. Noise on the outside. He stumbled back in anger. Back into the darkness. He threw back his head and hollered 'If i told you, you wouldn't listen!' He was right. The only people that he wanted to believe him were the ones that would smirk at his state of inebriation and cuss his generation. Again.