Thin Men, Yuppies, Saints, X'er's and well me...

“A yuppie most nearly approaches sainthood,” the book noted, “when he or she is able to accomplish more things in a single day than is humanly possible.” (The Yuppie Handbook)

"All of which means that the archetypal yuppie of the eighties sounds precisely like, um, everyone you know."

"By now, in fact, an argument could be made that the yuppie phenomenon is the most enduring and influential social movement of the past 50 years. The boomer media love to get all swoony over the Woodstock era, but how many real hippies do you know? The only remaining trace of hippie ideology can be found in supermarket aisles full of organic, farm-raised food—but don’t kid yourself: Those people creating a boom market for Whole Foods and organic baby food are yups, not hippies. Dead rebel artists like Burroughs and Kerouac were long ago turned into useful “bohemian” brands, tailor-made for Gap ads, but nobody actually aspires to be a beatnik anymore. (At this point, beret might as well be French for dickhead.)"

"Even back in 1991, novelist Douglas Coupland, the man who introduced the term Generation X into the mainstream, was picking up on a generation’s natural vulnerability to comfort. “When you’re 27 or 28, your body starts emitting the Sheraton enzyme,” he told People. “You can no longer sleep on people’s floors.” By 37, the Sheraton enzyme mutates into the Four Seasons endorphin. People, like neighborhoods, have a tendency to gentrify. On my recent trip to the West Coast, I went back to the section of Pasadena that used to be my beloved slacker drag strip in the eighties—a scrungy wonderland of pawn shops, Bukowski-approved dives, vintage clothing shops, used bookstores, greasy taco trucks. As I poked around in this," "it came as a shock to see that every last drop of that suburban boho-scape was now gone, replaced by upscale trattorias and tapas bars, boutiques and Pottery Barn and Tiffany’s.

A shock, but only a minor one. While the yuppies were colonizing my favorite neighborhood, apparently they were doing the exact same thing to my brain."

Jeff Gardinier (The Return of the Yuppie)

Do not go where the path may lead,

go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

Ralph Waldo Emerson