Tasting Failure in the Frequency of Change

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Parking Lot Frequencies

Publix Parking Lot, 2:27 PM

I'm waiting in the strip mall lot where my son's school lets out, radio talking about flying cars in production for 2026, like it's Tuesday, like we didn't spend our whole 80s childhoods sketching them in notebook margins during social studies, Mrs. Henderson droning about how TV ruined America while we dreamed forward into a future we were sure would be shinier than this.

The MAGA protesters are back by the Starbucks, signs about pronouns and bathrooms, standing ten feet from a man sleeping against the Publix wall under a sign that says "Where Shopping Is A Pleasure."

My phone buzzes: Harvard study suggests aliens might be underground. Pentagon admits 757 UAP sightings. Flying cars entering production. AI writing symphonies.
And I'm sitting here trying to remember if I turned off the stove, watching a woman in yoga pants cancel her reusable cup purchase because the cashier said "guys" instead of "folks," then climb into her SUV blasting a podcast about mindfulness.

The radio switches to news about boomers still clinging to podiums, their wives leading them around stages, repeating reporters' questions in their ears (Trump or Biden?), and I hear myself sound just as stodgy as the boomers sounded about us, when I try to explain to my son why I can't follow his Discord servers, why the architecture he's building in digital space makes my chest tight with something I can't name—not fear exactly, but its electromagnetic cousin, that copper taste that means systems are shifting.

Here he comes now, linebacker shoulders in Hello Kitty sweatpants, laughing with a girl who has a baby fetus dangling from a chain around her neck (his generation wears their politics like jewelry, ironic and earnest at once), walking past the protesters who probably can't compute him—this gentle giant who codes sustainable architecture, who treats gender like a spectrum and pronouns like courtesy and gets irritated when I smile too much in the mornings because it feels like pressure.

He navigates the parking lot like he's switching between dimensions—one earbud in, always partially elsewhere, his phone screen glowing with whatever world he and his friends are building while the MAGA guy yells about traditional values and the homeless man asks for change and the woman in the Tesla (autopilot she swears is alien tech) refuses to make eye contact with either of them.

Scientists at CERN smash particles at near light speed looking for the fundamental forces that hold reality together. My son is doing the same thing in his bedroom at midnight, coding green threads through digital steel, sustainable futures in pixels, while I lie awake wondering if worry itself is just the frequency of my generation—raised on nuclear drills and "just say no," told the world was ending so many times we forgot how to hear when it actually might be beginning.

The thing about electromagnetic fields is you can't always tell if you're detecting real danger or just the hum of transformation. Refrigerators drop from 60 to 58.7 hertz forty-three minutes before the power fails—except sometimes the frequency shift just means the system is recalibrating, upgrading itself to handle more current than the old wiring could support.

He opens the car door, brings in the smell of teenage boy and Florida heat, drops his backpack with the weight of textbooks we could have fit on a chip the size of a grain of rice but still print on paper because some bureaucrat my age decided kids need the "tactile experience of learning."

"How was school?"

"Fine. Did you see the thing about the UFOs?"

He's already showing me his phone—Pentagon footage of objects moving through water and air like they're the same substance, and he's not amazed, not shocked, just interested the way he's interested in everything: curious, open, assuming the universe will keep revealing itself to be stranger and more possibility-filled than we imagined.

The protesters are shouting now, and the homeless man has moved to the median, and the yoga pants woman is posting about her moral stance, and somewhere a barista is getting fired for a tweet, and somewhere a cousin is unfollowing a cousin, and we're all practicing for civil war in strip mall parking lots, armed with signs and hashtags and the certainty that we're right and they're destroying everything—
while my son asks if we can stop for boba tea, while his generation slides through gender and identity like it's just data they're still collecting, while they build virtual architectures and actual friendships and wear their contradictions like Hello Kitty pants—soft and fierce and utterly unbothered by the borders we spent our whole lives defending.
"There's a new place," he says. "They have taro milk tea and the owner's kid goes to my school, they're nonbinary, just opened last week—"
And I'm trying to listen but the radio is talking about how the information age delivered everything we sketched in those 80s classrooms—global networks, machine intelligence, proof we're not alone in the universe—and all we can do with it is argue about paper straws and oat milk and which pronouns will destroy civilization, unfollowing and boycotting our way through the future we begged for.
My son is talking about his friend's panic attack, how they helped them breathe through it in the bathroom, how mental health is just something they discuss like the weather or homework, no stigma, no shame, just: "They're anxious today, we're handling it."
We hid everything—fear and queerness and doubt—stuffed it down like Beanie Babies in storage units, tagged and preserved and never loved, investments that never matured, kept just in case they became valuable if we waited long enough.
His generation doesn't wait. They wear their uncertainty like jewelry, their fluidity like Hello Kitty pants, and I'm nodding along, admiring this openness, this refusal to hoard and defend, until—
"Oh, and Jackson's dad is helping us with the economic model," he says, scrolling through his phone. "He works for DSA, does mutual aid organizing. It's actually really cool how they—"

And there it is: that copper taste in my mouth.

My chest does the thing it does, that electromagnetic tightening, and I hear myself say "You know socialism doesn't actually work, right?" in exactly the same frequency my mother used when she found my first Ani DiFranco CD, the same tone the MAGA guy probably uses about pronouns, and my son looks at me the way I look at people who still think the internet is a fad.

"My generation doesn't have the blocks in our thinking you do. We aren't scared to consider things. We're just exploring different models, Mom. Like, trying to figure out what actually works."

And I want to explain about Venezuela, about history, about how markets lifted billions out of poverty, about how you can't just—but I'm watching his face do the thing my face does when boomers talk about cursive, that patient expression that means you're doing it again, you're tasting failure in the frequency of change.

I'm the MAGA protester with a different sign. I'm the one standing ten feet from my own sleeping certainty, insisting that my borders are the real ones, the important ones, the ones that actually matter.
The protesters are packing up now, the homeless man is gone, the strip mall empties and refills with the tide of 3 PM traffic—people buying groceries where shopping is supposedly a pleasure, getting coffee from chains that promise ethical sourcing while paying minimum wage, everyone performing their version of righteous while the actual future (the flying cars, the AI, the aliens, the kids) keeps arriving whether we're ready or not.

I start the car. The radio shifts to a station playing music from when
I was his age—songs about rebellion that became the soundtrack to car commercials, revolution commodified and sold back to us with a good beat and a nostalgia discount.

"Mom," he says, looking up from his phone, "you're doing the thing."

"What thing?"

"The worried thing. The frequency thing. I can see you trying to figure out if everything's falling apart."

And he's right—I am calibrated to detect collapse, tuned to taste that copper forty-three minutes before everyone else starts gathering candles.
"Is it falling apart?" I ask him.

He shrugs, the way only teenagers can shrug—like the question itself is the wrong frequency.

"I don't know. Probably some of it. But like, we're also building stuff. Better stuff. Stuff that actually works instead of just looking like it works."

He goes back to his phone, and I can see the green threads of his design—sustainable architecture for digital spaces, algorithms that account for climate and equity and actual human needs instead of just profit margins.

They're not fighting about bathrooms. They're just using them. They're not debating pronouns. They're just asking and adjusting. They're not arguing about whether climate change is real. They're already designing for the world it's creating.

The universe is still expanding at 70 kilometers per second per megaparsec, every atom pushing further from every other atom except where gravity creates density so extreme it collapses into something else entirely—black holes, neutron stars, matter compressed until it transcends its original form.

I start to imagine my generation as the expanding part, spreading thin, diffusing, fighting about which direction to fly apart.
His generation as the gravity.

When we get to the boba place, the owner's kid is behind the counter, hair dyed green, name tag says "River," and my son orders like he's done this a hundred times, knows everyone's pronouns without asking, tips well, laughs at an inside joke I'm not part of.

I order taro even though I don't know what it is.

The drink is purple and sweet and strange, and I'm trying to decide if I like it when my son glances over, catches me mid-evaluation, and smiles—not the patient smile, not the crazy-eyed smile, just the smile that means Mom, you're thinking too hard again.

He's already researched this place, I realize. Knows what taro is, how it's grown, probably River's whole supply chain. My son maps differently than I do—not for danger, but for connection.

I stop trying to evaluate because I know he already has, in a way I can’t follow—because it’s so different from the way I do it. But I can follow him, this man-child I raised in all his pink-kitty, sustainable goodness. I watch him move through this strange nonbinary café like he owns it, and I wonder how it’s already his turn to lead sometimes. I smile, feel my eyes swell, and just drink the purple thing.