I close my eyes, feel the grogginess from the pills dissolving, and end up dreaming about my parents again. We’re on the back deck that I helped paint when I was a kid. Dad’s showing me how to strip the old flaking paint and sand it down, the dust rising around us in the early summer light. There’s the crisp smell of Rocky pines, the deck warming with morning, the cool night air evaporating in a mist around us. My father’s face is freckled with paint chips, the sunlight behind him highlighting the deck, everything feeling good until I feel the wires within the sunbeams: a thousand tiny strands entering my eyes, pulling memories from me into the glowing sun above with a sickly popping sound.

I awake from the nightmare to an incoming suggestion. How about some words from inspirational leaders to lighten your mood? Synapse asks.

I agree, listen to a powerful speech on inner freedom by Nelson Mandela, and I even tear up a little, but mostly because Mandela’s world was so unlike ours. The peaks of South Africa are gone, the Rockies too. Two years ago, when a job for a Tower technician opened in Denver, I flew out for the interview and saw the brown expanse of earth where the mountains used to be. One low peak that hadn’t yet been removed rose like a mistake. I rented a car, went to the interview, and tried to visit my hometown, but the old mining-company fences stretched for miles. I drove and drove but couldn’t find any way in. Finally, I stopped at a Conoco station, where the kid working the pumps told me the only entrance was two hundred miles north.

“You looking for mining work?” he asked. “Coal’s all gone.”

“I just want to see Lyons again,” I said.

He looked at me in the dim station lights. “There aren’t any lions behind that fence.”

Question: You ever wonder what we missed during all those years? Ever feel like our parents owe us for them?

“I know this might sound clichéd,” I think as I drive toward my parents’ house, “but our parents don’t owe us. They gave birth to us, they raised us, and yes, they made serious mistakes. But our work is to focus on the present and build the future. It’s our generation, our technology, our victory.” I post the answer, make it available for purchase, but it’s not very popular. As for my actual feelings about the issue? They fucking robbed us.