In trying to overcome the human condition, I began to repel it. When basic human need is overwhelming, where everybody I know is going through the same turmoil. Every rich kid has the same delusion of grandeur and every middle class kid believes he’s entitled to his middle class frustration. Talk of suicidal tendencies sitting in air-conditioned kitchens swapping stories on yoga and the tragedy of a dead best friend; all of us just need an excuse to lament. A father to blame, an ex girlfriend to call ‘bitch,’ a boss to hate while we fill up the pits of our own inadequacies playing the game of mutual consolation. The urban utopian dream – a reward for our manufactured reality where we think we know pain, we think we might be onto something, a futile effort in fighting our own mediocrity.
Self pity, somebody once mentioned, was a very satisfying form of indulgence. Us, with our shining bright eyes and throbbing names and perfect dictions, celebrating the enigma of Kerouac and the kick in a sharp, clean Red, us with our 4 am sleeping pills and three day cocaine benders buying into an empty promise of a much needed oblivion. Where marketing compensates for a lack of talent, when you slice your thumb open by mistake and realize that’s the closest you’ve come to feeling anything in ages, where the big cats are discussing the tops cats while everybody else discusses them, where big cars hold broken families together and kissing is a luxury. Where self pity is a commodity – to be traded for stories over stiff Bloody Marys and the only way to catch a moment to breathe is to light a cigarette.
And we scroll through our Facebook newsfeeds, our Twitter timelines, our iPhone filters and Instagram, hoping to feel an inkling of the joy we seem to splash over social media like a teenager chancing upon masturbation on a bored afternoon. Childhood wonders lost, as emblematic as your first dog being put down, we grow up in a hurry, chasing the first years of our twenties like the last rays of the sun cruising like sharks on an ebbing ocean, let’s talk, let’s talk of art as we know it, allusions and imagery of heartbreak, and let debate existential questions on hot Sunday afternoons, let’s fuck our basics up and talk of Sartre, let’s listen to the blues and validate our depression with poetry. Somewhere, someone is hurting over the loss of a limb or the splinter of heartbreak lodged in their throat, but we’ve got lines to chase, Friday nights taken care of, and words spill over like grotesque shapes drawn in the hand of a child, giving meaning to things that don’t exist.
Let’s walk out to the nearest store, purchase another piece of our souls with the latest jazz quartet in town painting a grim soundtrack for the lack of tension in our routines. The curtains have fallen down, and the actors have long left singing tales of Aspirins and co-dependency. What has the taste of exclusivity to it – theatre or film? The existential questions plaguing the morning coffee, sprinkling our vocabulary with big words like it’s supposed to give the listener the impression that we we’re blessed with special genitalia, with our intelligent laughter and pointless banter, gnawing at the base of the human pyramid, it sounded so right when Ginsberg talked of it, but I sound like somebody far too stuffed for their own good on sophisticated Gymkhana evenings, chasing the sweet idea of utopia, not realising dystopia seems to be the norm of the age.
