sadly, youth makes a whore of beauty

Excerpt from “Meeting Elise” in the collection of short stories by Nam Le in The Boat
Sadly, youth makes a whore of beauty.

Don’t get me wrong, I like kids- Olivia was thirty years younger than me. I even wanted to have some with her. The problem is there are just too many of them. You can’t throw a brick on this island without concussing one. I wish I had more restraint. But I can’t help but hate how they look at me, how they don’t look at me. I hate their interchangeable bodies, their mass-rehearsed attitudes, their cars that look like boxes, like baseball caps, like artificial enlargements, their loud advertising, their beeps and clicks and trings, I hate how they speak words as though they’re chewing them, how they assume the business of the world revolves around them- how they’re right- and how everywhere this cult of youth, the pedamorphic dumbing-down, has whored beauty- duped, drugged, damaged, pixilated it and everywhere turned it to plastic.