Best Life Ever.
We know everything was built to expire, so I guess we've done everything -- Modest Mouse, "We've Got Everything," We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank
Life is of nothing much and too much. - Nick Hornby
We know everything was built to expire, so I guess we've done everything -- Modest Mouse, "We've Got Everything," We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank
Life is of nothing much and too much. - Nick Hornby
We all went to college and got degrees, some of us in things we like. Maybe actually love. (love)
And now we all work in grocery stores, in restaurants, in banks, in department stores. We never thought we would have jobs like this again. We are new people in a thousand new places at once. We are children with access to alcohol and technology and sometimes bigger vocabularies. We wonder if this is what failure feels like.
We wonder if it's all passing us by.
The alarm goes off in the morning and we want to cry. Getting out of bed seems the wrong way to start the day.
On Saturday nights, we stand in stores at 7pm, getting ready to do laundry, staring perplexed at the endless options of detergents.
We stand on porches at midnight in sweatpants drinking wine from a box and smoking cheap cigarettes. We think we are better than this. But we are wrong--no one is better than this.
We all hate our lives. But even this hate is laughable, a joke. We say 'hate' as easily as we say 'awesome', as often as we say we love inanimate objects. But never people. Loving people never seems worth the effort or the risk.
Why reason?
Drinking helps with life. What other people call hungover, we call morning. Our stomachs are stripped, our bodies are weak, our minds are leaky; money flies out pockets, to be consumed in mere seconds. Moments are all we have, and a moment with a drink is well-spent, happy or sad, in company or alone, remembered or forgotten.
We want to die before we get old. And why shouldn't we? We're bored already. We'll be happy when we're dead. We don't have the desire to care anymore. Cynicism and schadenfreude are our gifts. We are playfully pessimistic. We have absolutely no time for absolutes. We can only categorize by extremes, even as everything is grey. We are afraid of life. We always seem to want to be somewhere else. We want to just be where we are.
And so, everything is AWESOME. Whatever we are doing in the present moment: AWESOME. We could see this as the failure of exuberance, of exaggeration, of a loss of meaning of words. We could say it better, but whatever.
Do we repeat ourselves? So we repeat ourselves; We are infinite--We contain nothing.
But this flaw is also our one strength, our ultimate celebration of the present. Whatever we are doing is the worst or best thing that has ever happened, ever. This is how we talk. We live in a hypothetical space. We are catchphrase-making machines. We put blinders on the past; we refuse to look at the future. But the present is all we are guaranteed, all we are assured of.
So we look around and we realize we are the people we want to be: the young ones who sit in restaurants and don't eat and drink for hours and laugh really loud. We are awesome.
We will make it through this life. This day. This hour. This song. This cup of coffee. This cigarette. This drink. This morning. This night.
We ain't going nowhere. And somehow that is fine.
[submitted to burlybirdzine in March 2010. unpublished as of yet.]
And now we all work in grocery stores, in restaurants, in banks, in department stores. We never thought we would have jobs like this again. We are new people in a thousand new places at once. We are children with access to alcohol and technology and sometimes bigger vocabularies. We wonder if this is what failure feels like.
We wonder if it's all passing us by.
The alarm goes off in the morning and we want to cry. Getting out of bed seems the wrong way to start the day.
On Saturday nights, we stand in stores at 7pm, getting ready to do laundry, staring perplexed at the endless options of detergents.
We stand on porches at midnight in sweatpants drinking wine from a box and smoking cheap cigarettes. We think we are better than this. But we are wrong--no one is better than this.
We all hate our lives. But even this hate is laughable, a joke. We say 'hate' as easily as we say 'awesome', as often as we say we love inanimate objects. But never people. Loving people never seems worth the effort or the risk.
Why reason?
Drinking helps with life. What other people call hungover, we call morning. Our stomachs are stripped, our bodies are weak, our minds are leaky; money flies out pockets, to be consumed in mere seconds. Moments are all we have, and a moment with a drink is well-spent, happy or sad, in company or alone, remembered or forgotten.
We want to die before we get old. And why shouldn't we? We're bored already. We'll be happy when we're dead. We don't have the desire to care anymore. Cynicism and schadenfreude are our gifts. We are playfully pessimistic. We have absolutely no time for absolutes. We can only categorize by extremes, even as everything is grey. We are afraid of life. We always seem to want to be somewhere else. We want to just be where we are.
And so, everything is AWESOME. Whatever we are doing in the present moment: AWESOME. We could see this as the failure of exuberance, of exaggeration, of a loss of meaning of words. We could say it better, but whatever.
Do we repeat ourselves? So we repeat ourselves; We are infinite--We contain nothing.
But this flaw is also our one strength, our ultimate celebration of the present. Whatever we are doing is the worst or best thing that has ever happened, ever. This is how we talk. We live in a hypothetical space. We are catchphrase-making machines. We put blinders on the past; we refuse to look at the future. But the present is all we are guaranteed, all we are assured of.
So we look around and we realize we are the people we want to be: the young ones who sit in restaurants and don't eat and drink for hours and laugh really loud. We are awesome.
We will make it through this life. This day. This hour. This song. This cup of coffee. This cigarette. This drink. This morning. This night.
We ain't going nowhere. And somehow that is fine.
[submitted to burlybirdzine in March 2010. unpublished as of yet.]
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