page 1: Nobody was much for talking by the time I hit the scene
page 2: I didn't mean for this to be an autobiography
page 5: I dreamed writing this.
page 6: Sometimes i think about freaking out in the hallway at school
page 9: Okay, he had this video camera
page 11: I was sitting in the passenger seat of Jack's car
page 13: Your friend is addicted to to drugs
page 14: It's like I have all these stacks of letters around me
page 15: My generation has been lied to
Nobody was much for talking by the time I hit the scene. That's why they were
so good at it. We were all self taught windbag philosophers. A single revelation,
under the right circumstances, could change your life forever. As it should,
we believed. Not that anyone believed in anything, that was the point. Satisfaction
attained from disappointment. Engaging in nothing and then exaggerating it later,
to make it sound like you had been deeply involved in some profound, important
nothing. Flirting with boys by telling them you didn't see an objective to flirting.
Putting out fire with gasoline. Consumed with the fashion of rejecting fashion.
Waking up late and counting the number of hours you'd slept. Counting the number
of hours you'd been awake, and comparing statistics with anyone who was around.
Everyone had a limit they were out to deny. Everyone was struggling and everyone
was insane. There was a shared sensation of asphyxiation, of drowning, of profound
apathy. Everyone was profound in those days. Everyone's dying now.
The desperation shared among what seemed to us to be an entire generation was
breathtakingly beautiful. There was hope in hopelessness. We were political,
we were poets, we were going to be rockstars apart from any machine. Black,
and white. So complicated that it was simple. It hurts me to admit that I can
only guess at what they were, at who they are. I'm already lost, writing this.
Perfect. This isn't my story, anyway.
Jack was
I didn't mean for this to be an autobiography. This was supposed to be about
him. The problem is, what I really know are my own stories. Back in elementary
school they introduced us to the phrase "Write what you know". That
idea used to infuriate me. All the best stories were about things no one had
ever experienced; impossible things. Later on I learned that some people are
just better than others at turning what they know into a fairy tale.
My hair has been ever colour. You know? In grade eight I paid my mom's hairdresser
to bleach strips of my hair and dye them blue. Electric blue. What was I listening
to? I think I saw Jennifer Love Hewitt do it in a magazine. It was the year
2000, see for yourself.
It was bands like Placebo and The Smashing Pumpkins. Of course it was Marilyn
Manson. It was everything from Pink Floyd to The Get Up Kids. It was shaving
your head and dying your goatee green. It was thinking about killing kids at
school. We were on to something big. We never got there. We sure died trying.
We hate our parents. All of us.
Family. What the fuck is that? I would I want something like that? I try to
build my own but they fall apart. Obviously, all you have is yourself. So who
cares? Can you argue with me? I'm everyone you've ever met. Who do you think
you're kidding? Keep it up, Mom and Dad, you'll be dead soon.
(Fantasy) Wake up one day on a park bench, some girl screaming in you ear. Hello,
hello?!? I'M GOING TO PERFORM CPR ON YOU, O.K.?!? Her hands are shaking your
shoulders and they feel like they're going to break. So what? What happens next?
Maybe a hawk swoops down and carries her away. Who fucking cares. Forget this.
Hypocrite.
Selling out. To live without selling out. Criteria; Lonliness. Anger. Discomfort.
That feeling in your upper back, you want to plunge knives into your spine and
twist. What is that feeling? Indulge. Never indulge. There is no wrong and right.
Don't mention God.
Idiots!!!
Selling out. Why write any of this. I don't care about you. After I rip myself
apart, what do I owe to you? I don't want anything you've got. Don't believe
me if I say that I do. Prove me wrong.
Prove me wrong.
You can't.
Hate.
Minimalism.
Sell out.
I dreamed writing this. Deja vu. Writing letters to myself. I'm always thinking
about someone outside of the circle. I'd want him around all the time. What's
the use of dating, dating is boring, dating is awkward, dating is a waste of
my spare time. I'd want him around during those times that you don't mind having
to share. Eating meals, sleeping, watching movies. Those moments sitting against
the wall staring at everything that's flawed about the baseboards. They're filthy,
they don't align with the tile... so he's there. He can say anything he wants.
I don't need support, I don't want lies, eventually he runs out of lies and
then he's gone. He'll be gone. But we're pretending that this is different.
So, okay, sometimes he knows the perfect record to put on, and he likes to play
with my hair. Violent, delirious arguments. Or maybe not. Maybe it's just quiet,
the spoon clinking against the sides of the tea cup, morning coughs, slippers
on the wood floor, and we never leave, we never fucking leave each other. Indulge
in fantasy. Don't look for it... dream it.
Hope.
The word "jaded". That's been a hit.
Sometimes i think about freaking out in the hallway at school. I wonder why
no one ever has. It would be such a thing; no one has ever done that, no one
has ever been so fed up with the robotic, slow movement between classes that
they just... the faces and the hairspray and the backpacks and the idiot teenage
catchphrases clenched fists screaming violence ever HEY YOU!!! GET OUT OF MY
WAY!!! GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY WAY!!! HURRY UP, YOU FUCKING ASSHOLES!!! I'LL
FUCKING KILL YOU ALL, D O Y O U H E A R M E no, it never happens. It would be
a big deal if that happened. I'll probably never do that.
Most of us have trouble graduating.
Lotty. I met Lotty when we were twelve years old, our first year of junior high.
I made her laugh in french class. My friends were geeky wallflowers, her friends
were fun and rebellious. She liked my poetry. Nothing much has changed. Lotty
knew a lot of boys, and Lotty knew Everett. Everett knew Keith. Keith became
Jack, and somehow this all led to countless weird highway drives, a stack of
cheap walmart photo prints, and motorcycle dust coating my hair. Of course,
Dotty doesn't really agree with me about Jack.
He was writing this stupid book.
I bought into it. Time and time again. You buy into it. Stalks and bonds. Haha,
accidental wit. It's a killer to want something from someone. As if you expect
them to be able to give you that forever. Find it in yourself. Lonely? Suppression.
Am I the last person in the world to figure all of this out? If yes, why hasn't
everyone just... oh, you fucking crazies, you know, you figured it out ages
ago, we're the only ones left who are struggling with it, the last few romantics,
the dreamers, asking the questions and denying the answers, incredulous, hopeful,
jaded, you've all sold out and we're still in the marketplace, you crazy fucking
bastards, I have never felt despair like this, and if I can ignore this I can
ignore anything. We all win our separate battles because we all make our own
rules.
Okay, he had this video camera. He was working in this pig slaughtering place
and he was taking home something like four hundred dollars a week. He was living
at home then, too. So he bought this video camera, it was alright, your standard
kind of thing, and he was always behind it, he had to capture everything. For
his children. Satanist children? What are they gonna end up like? I can't remember
if I just wondered that or asked it aloud. Anyway, he was an artist in that
sense, he had to record everything. Wait until I tell you the highway story.
For Jack, disposable cameras were all the rage. So much fucking rage. We were
exhausted. Was it the art that wore us down? Bad photos and endless writing
and mathematics and that damn video camera tape after tape after tape and you
just knew that he was recording everything else with his eyes. I remember that
camera more than his eyes, honestly.
I'm going about this all wrong, my naustalgia should be outrage. But these people
were beautiful, the only pure life I've ever known. I believe that, I really
do. I need you around, I really do.
Graduation's coming. I'm almost out of this fucker. There's this perspective,
this view that I've noticed, the rest of the world's tendency to block out anyone
under the low tide line of highschool. You ignore us kids, we're not worth a
thought. We're being taken care of. We're nothing like you. We're fine. Wake
up.
I was sitting in the passenger seat of Jack's car. We were driving down the
highway. I was pestering him with questions, even though I knew that he would
never give me a straight answer on anything I asked. It was a game, really.
He was telling me about the youth home he'd lived in, his racist roommate who
would never shut up, the fights he'd gotten into, poems he'd written. If Jack
was good at anything, it was telling stories about himself. Suddenly he was
slowing the car, bringing us to a complete stop on the side of the highway and
turning off the engine. Picking something up from beside him, he opened his
door, got out of the car, slammed the door shut, and walked back behind the
car. I whirled around in my seat and watched him through the car's back window.
He was maybe ten meters behind the car now, circling a dark object on the ground.
Now he was bending forwards, snapping pictures of it with his disposable camera.
Roadkill. I'm fairly sure that it was a raccoon. Afterwards, he walked back
to the car, opened the door, got in, slammed the door closed, and started the
car, dropping the camera back down between the seats. I don't think either one
of us said a word.
He had this book in the back of his car, about mathematics and aliens. Sort
of astrology heavy, apparently it proved that the Mayan people had been from
outer space. I started reading the introduction while Jack was buying brownies
and chocolate milk at this gas station store, and it seemed pretty ridiculous.
When he came back I asked him if he really believed that, and he told me that
a fat man in a pink shirt and sandals pumping gas was an alien. Because no one
from Earth would ever dress that way.
Paranoid money, stashed all around my room for emergencies. One day my parents took away my bank card and all of the cash I that they knew I had. From the money I'd literally squirreled away in my room I managed to scrape together about seventy dollars with which to buy drugs by the end of the night. It was a game, everything was a game.
Your friend is addicted to to drugs. You worry, you remember all the good times
you've had with her. You watch the distance between you grow as she fades into
her addiction. One day she tells you that she's going to get clean. You eagerly
promise to give her your full support, anything she asks for, you watch over
her, and all the while deep down, you know she's going to get back on drugs.
You know that by the end of the week, if she manages to stay clean that long,
she'll be completely immersed in the depression that invariably accompanies
sobriety. She might develop flashbacks or panic attacks. She'll probably want
to commit suicide. Maybe she'll try. You stay by her side. You go through Hell
with her. Then she disappears. Finally you manage to reach her somewhere by
phone. She's back on drugs. She's doing just fine. You're a mess. Friends are
killer.
At some point I decided that if things ever got really bad, I would leave, just
take off for somewhere. I had Europe in mind. I haven't done it so far. I'm
still in the same place.
It's like I have all these stacks of letters around me. Imagine the power of
all those unsent letters. The constant disappointment working like glue, pages
sticking to your hands. I don't give a damn about you, Jack. But I'm not being
fair, I'm breaking the rules, writing these letters and never sending them.
And how incredibly cowardly. I don't want my answers at all, I enjoy this room
of questions far too much to ever want to leave it's comforts. Ignore everything
I say because I'm using all the wrong punctuation.
This is a lie. I never knew a person named Jack. There never was a person named
Jack.
I'm not in love with you, I'm just infatuated with your existential dilemma.
Come closer. Cry for me. Baby. Now get out. Rinse. Repeat. Jack. Jack. Jack.
Jack. Jack, tell me. How does it feel to be a symbol? (and then I ask myself,
how does it feel to be making a symbol, out of a man who is experiencing a life
you can't even imagine, pains you will likely never even be witness to, (he
could be dead, he could be fine, he could be having the time of his life, he
could have found jesus, he could be dead,) and you're here making words and
more words-
Not that anyone is alone in their delusions of grandeur. Jack's stupid novel,
my stupid interview, which led to stupid inner monologues meant to be realised
as stupid film scripts, which led to nothing, which led to this, and if this
is or isn't going anywhere then we are all doomed. Picture me smiling. Picture
a bullet in my forehead. Picture Jack in prison, wearing a bright orange prison
suit and doing that thing with his neck. Wonder what Everett's up to. Wonder
if I'll grow up in time. Debate shame, choose to be pigheaded, more words. There
are rooms filled with us. Picture those. Picture a flood. Picture nothing.
Clutter.
Hum.
It would be a silent film. Everything would happen as I remember it, as I have
to believe it happened. And there would be no words. We were all action in those
days anyway. What's happened to us?
My generation has been lied to. Denied. Slaughtered. Starry eyed girl, brightest
in her class, dyeing her hair green and ranting about pop-corn monsters and
nasty boys and some guy who killed himself in 1994. Because it's the right thing
to do. She's been high for days because it's the right thing to do, and who
is around to talk her straight? The origins of the lie would be the root of
the problem but I can't see the lie for the jungle. Meanwhile she likes the
stories I write. Meanwhile, meanwhile, meanwhile, another wasted hour thinking
about it the wrong way. The easy way. Wouldn't it be right to not think about
it at all? But I can't do that now, she can't do that now, because the right
thing is to talk about a guy who killed himself in 1994. She's doing the right
thing. Thank god it's easy. And she thinks she has it hard, which makes it easier
to continue, harder to pull her out of, harder to pull out of. Do you know what
I mean? We're not the same person but we may as well be.
Maybe it IS the right thing to do.
Prove me wrong. Prove me wrong. I've written this before. and before. and before.
The deja vu of deja vu of writing this, and then deleting this because it's
irrelevant- and i've written this before, exactly, exactly, so like Artaud i've
given up on regular coherence and i trust you to follow along with my mind,
if it's anything like yours how hard could that be? this is a big deal. this
is a step. outside the world hums. writer writer writer.
What is this? Who is writing this? How many layers before this becomes a valid
perspective? Why can't it just be a cry, interpreted later, an SOS if you will.
I don't have any answers, I just have this silent movie and all these words
glorified by confused generations of kids to use to fill in the breaks and make
a believable plot out of a series of wasted days, one on top of the other, each
of our days piled like the papers on the floor of my room, total anarchy, maybe
all I can give you is one more scream-
Hum.
Why bother.
Clutter.
Relax, you got out.
I did?
Not even close. I was being sarcastic. I was being kind. You've made it worse.
I know.