tbh I don’t hate it as much as the first time I read it. Like I understand where she’s going with it. and idk, this is like one page, maybe things get better. My main issue is that it reads like if you ran the prompt “Beat generation but gen z” through an AI model trained exclusively on fascist blue check tweets. Like if you don’t have a phD in terminally online right-wing culture, you’d have to look up every other word and the sense in which it is used. I get that it’s trying to use modern lingo, but it’s just doing way too much, it’s as if she crammed every sort of youth internet culture signifier she could think of into one page. I had to read this one page multiple times to see that no she actually is writing a story here and it’s not just some nonsense Burroughs-esque cut-up novel made up entirely of new right dogwhistles and the most obscure gen z slang.

It’s far from the worst thing I’ve ever read, but as a former Beat worshipper I wrote far better free associative wannabe Beat prose when I was in high school. I can’t believe something like this got published, it needs a lot of work.