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 Health Articles archives
Monday, July 19, 2004 moments that need a nice solid friendship are moments I cannot live with and without. and here I am tonight - just like every other night that I enjoy and remember and eventually think back to and think “yes, that was one of the best nights of my life.” my life, my life and my life. what does it say about ones life when they are scared to be alone? what does it say about ones personality, when they have that fear? so who cares and I’m on the train anyway. I read someone else’s newspaper and take comfort in their creases and half completed cross-words. it’s the first time in 34 hours I read the word “rhythm” and I try to read a lot of books and I’m sick of war-humour. let’s take another stop and give and receive more crazy and confused numbed souls whom I can’t be bothered with and enjoy hating so much, to a certain extent anyway. how can I hate someone I don’t even know? it’s probably the easiest thing possible. it’s usually at a neutral temperature. i’m cold and my chest is the Earth. an Asian man sits next to me and I want to high-five him because that is absurd. here it comes. he picks up the newspaper I that discarded earlier and flicks through the pages. I see the completed cross-word cross his path and the randomly circled death notice as I slide by him to make my way to the closing automatic machine door. my groin in perfect position, as always. as I step into the cliched night i’m feeling worthy and needed and slightly self-conscious as someone like myself would, as I actually believe that my thoughtless pen has made some sort of a difference. I just can’t help but try and be jimmy dean at moments like these, but did he also have to fight the temptation of the inevitable thoughts of the everyday hours? thinking of the thoughts that aren’t really needed in the final scheming arse-whole of things? there isn’t much more, I just want to be cool but fuck you. you’re not ready to think that yet. the fact that we are all still here and still moving forward and still fooling ourselves proves that this life is a joke and this world as an arse-whole is the punch line. it has come to this; plastic lights of plastic colours passing by the oblivious people with their plastic boy-friends and girl-friends in their unconscious fake lives of television characters created by plastic writers with plastic thoughts from the plastic gods and plastic drinks and a plastic sense of humour. but who gives a shit about a sense of humour anyway? I find somewhere where only my deep dark hidden fears and weaknesses can find me and I buy myself a drink. yeah we all want to go to quiet, untouched, laid-back lounges and pubs, but it’s just the way they’re made. they are merely produced that way and we are all fooled yet again. I love it and I hate it and I drink my second drink. bar-tenders are always an example of the extremities of the mechanisms we always take for granted. I’ll pretend to be dark and mysterious, and he’ll pretend to like to me - to be my friend and understanding within this frustrating cliche. I will pretend to be experienced and hard done by - to be thoughtful and one of the best - to be happy with myself and to feel that yeah, I am what I want to be and they know it and I know it and they know it and I know it and they know it and I know it and they don’t know that that’s all there really is to our day to day lives; our thoughts of others and of all the things around us. It’s complicated and endless and we’ll all go mad when we come to the realisation that times are tough and we are so beyond, so far beyond the aspects of thought we deliver from our anguish. I feel this way so therefore I take this drug. drink four and it is liquid. some man wearing a dinner suit sits next to me and starts putting on this act as though he is impressed and intrigued by me, and he’s expecting me to be honoured and interested - to return the favour. and I do as I feel that it is the appropriate punishment he deserves. to lie and pretend as opposed to letting him know what I really think of him– that’s what he deserves – a routine in return. I’m young and a living, drinking dream to him. I’m a dream he wants to touch and impress. he sees himself in me in more ways than a few. I know what he wants so I order him a drink and our pseudo-understanding is full steam ahead. we talk as though we’re in the same fucking boat – but if we were I’d throw him over board and row to shore and make it look easy - then buy some kick arse house that speaks the truth and proves everyone and everything wrong just by existing, and just by having me live in it - and I’d receive praise and honesty and live a good life which is the life I want to lead and ultimately leave one day - and live a life people envy and I will become a fashion and people will say “I used to play some sort of fucking sport with him when I was ten” and I’d forget them and I’d forget them all. however I’d remember this pathetic thirty-something year old guy in a dinner suit, who I threw overboard and who I spent in the name of my own life, because that’s what he means to me - and it’s not a bad thing to do. he is a fool and I’ll make a point of that and I make it worse for him. so inevitably we’re on drink six or seven and we’re very friendly at this point. the suited man is slurring his words, and I can see that pity is available in a liquid now. at this moment he is my best friend and he’ll hardly remember me tomorrow and I find it hard not to look at him and just shake my head - and then make weird looks to my old friend the bar-tender suggesting that I’m sitting next to worlds worst example of the everyday man. but he’s not even that, he is just average. he’s just a simple formula. everybody thinks they know, everybody thinks their experiences mean something - but nobody cares what you think, so spare us. I don’t fucking care how your nona made spaghetti and I don’t care as to what real spaghetti is and isn’t - my grandma made it from a can so fuck you and just leave me alone and try your best to do whatever it is you want on someone else. I’m just eating. I’m sick of “local-talent” as most of it is crap anyway and is only promoted by people who want to pretend they are apart of some sense of scene and don’t talk to me about festivals. wearing your op-shopped clothes and your counterfeit hippie-threads, you tell me not to judge people on the clothes they wear, but then you go away and you won’t talk to anyone wearing an expensive suit. I hate the idea of a young-artist taking themselves and their intensity so seriously. we’re all going through it and the chances are it it’s nothing compared to what’s coming up so save your energy. I’m sorry to break it to you but you are not crazy, it’s just the way things really are. no-one is impressed with you or your ideas, we’re just being nice. I want to sneak behind the bike-shed and take hits of scotch from my best friend’s older brothers hip-flask as the rest of the world plays this game and this life and this time and this issue and this ad-break and this life and this life and this life - as though it’s all life or death. I don’t want to change the world and I don’t want to make a difference and fuck my thoughtless pen and fuck revolution. think noble, act yokel. yeah I was eighteen once and you’re damn right I was fucking good at it too. don’t tell me about me life. don’t talk to me about what is happening and what’s going to happen and what I should do. so you got married at twenty-four and fucked up your life - you wanted to be an actor or a writer or some cliched admirable respectable badge of honour you can wear and mention every now and again when you eat your food and drink your wine and bitch about your brothers and sisters. no one looks up to you. there is no such thing an actor, there is no such thing as a writer, and there is definately no such thing as an artist. There are just wankers, and people who don’t even realise their wankers. and fuck conversation. conversation is just a place where wankers to jerk each other off. and by now he is far beyond telling me how much he loves or hates his father as every man who can’t handle themselves does. he’s greatest pride is embarrassing to me. I believe that if he knew I was writing about him right now it would be the highlight of his year so far, and that is a destroying feature. I’m normally sitting here alone, content and happy and honest, tightly wrapped in my remotely controlled view of everything around me as men like this one sit in their towers above me deciding on what I am going to do tomorrow. he tells me he was once given the honour of naming a small street in this city and I tell him he should’ve named it “revenue avenue” and he laughs without knowing why and he tells the bar-tender how much he likes me and I give the bar-tender a death-stare. the suited man invites me to go along with him to the small alley way that he named a few years ago so that we can see it and make-believe we are par-taking in some sentimental and meaningful act. and yeah, I go with him. the man was right as it was only a five-minute walk along some puddled blue-stone bricks and passed a fire extinguisher or two. I don’t talk much. we turn a corner and we both stand still at the top of this short dead-end alley way. it starts drizzling rain and we just stand there, looking down this pathetic and dirty alley-way in which he apparently named. there was a dirty florescent light flickering at the other end - lighting the place up in what felt to be a shade of hollow-green - with red and black graffiti all over the brick-walls and on a badly damaged roller-door the man next to me is struggling to stand still and he starts laughing to himself like his wife has just discovered he has a thing for young-boys. I finally notice a homeless man sitting against one of the walls and he looks comfortable with his face full of beard and stains. with the strong smell of urine in the air I feel the need to leave my mark and also make a difference the only way we can when we’re all drunk. I start taking a leak against the wall and keep on eye on my shoes. like a proposal for a staring competition, the suited man stands next to me and starts urinating as well. and I swear that I see his hand eventually reach across to me, but only to pull back quickly as a glimmer of hollow-green light against the wedding ring on his finger reminds him of where he is and what his life has become. all in one split peeling orange second it dawns on him that he is never going to change and that he is hopeless and he is fooling himself and always has. he realises that he is scared and respected and pathetic and that he was wrong all along. we were all wrong. we are not unlike others - we are just like them. we are not different and you are not an individual. we are not honest and we are not true to ourselves. because if we were, the world would be even more of a detestable place. that poor, poor homeless man. posted by Simon Monday, July 19, 2004
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