Often times (some times, most times) I think in curses:
It’s become cool to reference contemporary figures. I pledge not to reference anyone doing anything or being anything after the 90s as a knee-jerk reaction to your reactionary tactics. You’re young and I’m not and so I must pretend that it is better this way, that things are exactly the way they were meant to be, and that I have something you don’t, I have the wisdom that comes from experience. And I don’t fucking care if I sound like your grandmother, your grandmother is right, as was mine, as is mine, as will be mine. I can say that now, because said wisdom of experience gives you the knowledge to know. The force of reality thrusting its dick into my spine, won’t stop me writing what I have to say, specially in the comfort and perceived safety of my middlebrow dwelling in my western-civilised, policed, high-walled, barbed wire cell. Whether or not it’s true. Whether or not you believe me. This world is fucked. You are fucking it. I fucked it and now you’re gorging on my sloppy seconds. I was here first. I spat in your bassinet before you were born. I peed on your mother’s placenta. I ate her skin. I was here, she was here, you weren’t there so how do you know what we did and ate and shit. Fuck your Britney Spears, feed your Amy Winehouse a fucking sandwich and Kate Moss’s clothes line at H&M sucks. Fuck you all. I’m going back to the eighties. No the sixties. No the shitties, it’s all shit. You were fucked by the one who fucked me, and the one who fucked him, and the one who fucked him, and the one who fucked him and the one who fucked him. And still you feel no empathy. That’s fucked. I’m pissed. Self-righteous, elitist, entitled American-style pissed the fuck off. I’ll bend over and take it tomorrow. Right now I’m going to scream like a girl for a while. Fuck you.
Other times, I’m serenity incarnate:
I see a boy who is scared of growing old. I see my younger brother, if my younger brother could write. It’s not just because his references are also my own, by proxy through my younger siblings. So eager to shock, so willing to compromise everything; aspects of my own youth. But rather than tell him how wrong he is, how short-sighted, how inexperienced and unwise, I buddha-smile. Because he’s already half-dead. So it already half-matters.
Always I’m inclined to think the worst, because I tripped and fell on deaf ears.
Sometimes I think about you.
Sometimes I think about me.
Sometimes I drink about us. To escape.
But make no mistake… it is always unequivocally and without reservation: All. About. Me.
Just like that’s all about you.
We all have ourselves to contend with.
Bottom’s up.
