If I don’t kill myself before I turn forty I’ll wear
pearls and black and smile mysteriously
my soft wrinkles will make me look maternal and
I’ll be in heels every day my nails will be painted
respectable colours hair pinned back elegant
reading glasses reading things for a living
if I don’t kill myself before I turn forty then
one day I might build a treehouse at last.
I’ll have someone to build a treehouse with maybe
we’ll build that tree house after a conversation
brimming with pseudo-intellectualism but
it won’t bother me instead I’ll think: it’s OK because
we have all the time in the world to be pretentious
and young and if this cigarette kills me then so be it
because I might be dead anyway before I turn forty and
if I never attain elegance before then then maybe
ignorance is my safest bet it’s only five letters off.
Everyone is so predictable and boring boring boring and makes me want to shoot myself - maybe that’s why I always sign up for wild roller coaster rides with people who can keep up with me in terms of instability, maybe that’s why I have to complicate everything with my microscopic thought labyrinths &c. Is it the thrill of being flung into cold water, is that why I always have to push things and look for more, is that why I’m so terrifyingly impulsive in all the wrong moments? I think I’m onto something here. Nothing’s ever enough and I wonder why, I wish I could find a way to stop living in absolute extremes. I’m tired of extremes, tired of polar opposites, tired of the whole goddamn ricocheting. I’m really tired of myself, too.
+On The Hunger Games and perspective
In preparation for my going to see the movie next week (yes, I will watch the German voiceover - I have no principles) and to avoid Biology revision I read The Hunger Games a second time last night to realise that it’s been nearly three years since I first read the book, sat in the living room in the strangely cool setting sun. I’m not going to pretend that I have any weighty personal attachment to the story or anything, I just think the whole series is exciting and clever (I won’t go into its shortcomings now or ever because it’s just not the right object for snobbish criticism) and that’s that. But three years! I was fourteen, blonder, not a whole lot more innocent but certainly more naive and while I can imagine exactly where and how I sat reading The Hunger Games, I think of my younger self as someone I read about, someone completely detached from who I am now - just as I (heartlessly) think of my parents as two strangers who let me live in their house and kindly pay for my expenses. I don’t know, I just don’t feel like I ever was fourteen or any other age for that matter, I don’t feel like my childhood memories belong to me. Well, that’s all very peculiar, that’s all very sad, tell this to someone who cares - what I initially meant to say is the following. Rereading this (well-told) story about “bare-knuckle adventure” (The Times), starvation, violence and having to fight for your dear life under an oppressive regime - other than distracting me from learning about DNA translation and transcription - sends me into a spiral of half-ironic self loathing. Not because I am scared of dystopia, not because my emotional attachment to fictional characters is painstakingly high (which it is) but because everything seems to boil down to this: I’m always so acutely (too acutely?) aware of my own hypocrisy. Jesus Christ - pull yourself together, I tell myself all the time, you’re a primary example for ridiculous lower-upper-class anxiety: you have absolutely nothing to worry about except maybe academia (which in itself is nothing in comparison to, say, having to poach the woods to provide for your family and is also most likely a product of your comfortable social status) - your “troubled family life” is a joke, a joke, a joke and you yourself are, too. But tonight’s monologue ends on a slightly more desperate and confusing note: does being aware of my own ignorance cancel out my initial ignorance or does it just make me, it worse? Does ‘putting perspective’ on my (not in the least dramatic) situation make me more sensible or just even weaker? Can I stop being sad now? OK, good.
+Wednesday morning, I will not write about the weather I will not write about the weather I will not write about the weather. Nor about what I had for breakfast but there’s no need to repeat that. Spent most of last night sitting cross-legged on my bed, listening to The Age of Adz over and over again - this is what I thought I’d lost, loving something so unconditionally that you must stay up till morning just to think about it. Absolute, total adoration is the exact definition of what I missed so much. I think maybe that’s the reason for my being so goddamn sad, functioning but miserable, the lack of an object of worship. Maybe just existing independently, unanchored is faulty at its core - you need something to eulogise, no matter how abstract. Without this worship you’re alright, you collect your accomplishments, you get your scholarships and what-have-you but you’re not well, not exactly (“I want to be well / I’m not fucking around”). And no, I really don’t feel like accounting for my sadness, justifying it, explaining it, because that doesn’t matter anymore. Here you have another revelation of sorts: you can’t explain things away, by giving them words and theories and arguments you give them a home. And let me tell you one thing, neuroses love a good cosy goddamn home.
+My parents’ friends have begun dying: if I was more heartless I’d say they’re dropping like flies. I waited in my mother’s car while she bought a bouquet of flowers for a dying friend (in yellows and pinks, cheerful) and afterwards she bought me ice-cream where I always ate ice-cream when I was small. I felt strangely overgrown for the place, out of place, as though my legs and arms had become too long for my dress. The two scoops (always one mint chocolate-chip, the other banana) a relic from a time of spindly legs and sickly complexions. My mother said she’s now volunteering at the hospice. Meanwhile, my father has become a social activist. Is this the moment my books have prepared me for all this time, the central moment of complete and utter alienation? Is this where you’re supposed to say “I don’t even know my parents”? I never even knew my parents. My mother is still convinced that I’m autistic because I don’t like her touching me. Is this the time and place to share overly intimate details of my private life, like “I haven’t hugged my parents since I was eight and I really don’t want to start again”?
+Tomorrow my father is going out to protest against the closing of the acute day ward of the local hospital where he used to be chief surgeon before his retirement. He wrote “Rest in Peace” on an old bed sheet in red paint and dug out his old white coat. He and a surgeon friend have rented a coffin (!) to take with them and are currently looking for a hearse to drive. I don’t even know what to say. He’s fighting a losing battle on a sinking ship stuck between a rock and a hard place. I’ve never felt more alienated from my father before and Feeling Alienated is one of my special talents. I’ve said it before and I won’t hesitate to say it again: I feel really funny.
+Sometimes I wish you loved the way a dog loves: roll onto your back, your ribcage is mine, white belly completely exposed (the fragility of your internal organs being a symbol of how risky it is to feel). If you were more boyish and less composed then maybe you would, but for God’s sake please don’t stop ironing your shirts, never undo your top buttons so that we can stay antiseptic for ever. This is just one of the symptoms, I know, not seeing people for what they are but projecting them onto your bedroom ceiling: portraits with more feeling, hazy in places and sharpened around the contours of their jaws. Stay out of my diascope, I beg you.
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