Things You Don’t Say Out Loud
When I’m referring to some band, I like to call their front man by his first name. It gives people the impression I’m intimately acquainted with this distantly elevated celebrity. Even if I don’t know their name I’ll Google it. Google has revolutionized the art of pretension.
Who doesn’t hate the guy who goes to a crowded coffee shop to sit and casually read a book. Kurt Vonnegut none the less, or maybe even Chomsky. Maybe a stranger will approach you this time and confess their undying love based on your mutual uncommon love of modern era absurdist fiction novelist. If only life were that easy. But this is coming from a man who takes his evening walks from Napier to Broadway on the drive sporting a flannel shirt and smoking a clove cigarette in the vain hope that the natives will see and eventually habituate to my presence. In the end we’re both going to die alone.
I’m terrified that the times we’re living in are destroying my attention span. I can’t remember the last time I wrote anything longer than the minimum 200 words for an online dating profile. I’m terrified because I read someone once that said that my identity as a conscious person is entirely arbitrary. For all intense and purposes the persons you and I consider ourselves to be dies every night when we go to sleep, and every morning when you zone out in the morning meeting, or ever afternoon when your attention slips for that second. I’m convinced that all I have to hold me down as a continuous entity is a string of unbroken thoughts held together by prepositions.
I know for a fact I’ll be mediocre all my life. I know this because talent and success are relative terms, and every target I meet for myself will be replaced by a higher one. I know that objectively I should consider myself a successful and well adjusted member of society, but it’s just not that easy. In my early 20s I was a gigantic fuck up, and didn’t even realize it. You know your best days are behind you when you can point to a single moment in your life where you were both the happiest and the most disappointing.
Who doesn’t hate the guy who goes to a crowded coffee shop to sit and casually read a book. Kurt Vonnegut none the less, or maybe even Chomsky. Maybe a stranger will approach you this time and confess their undying love based on your mutual uncommon love of modern era absurdist fiction novelist. If only life were that easy. But this is coming from a man who takes his evening walks from Napier to Broadway on the drive sporting a flannel shirt and smoking a clove cigarette in the vain hope that the natives will see and eventually habituate to my presence. In the end we’re both going to die alone.
I’m terrified that the times we’re living in are destroying my attention span. I can’t remember the last time I wrote anything longer than the minimum 200 words for an online dating profile. I’m terrified because I read someone once that said that my identity as a conscious person is entirely arbitrary. For all intense and purposes the persons you and I consider ourselves to be dies every night when we go to sleep, and every morning when you zone out in the morning meeting, or ever afternoon when your attention slips for that second. I’m convinced that all I have to hold me down as a continuous entity is a string of unbroken thoughts held together by prepositions.
I know for a fact I’ll be mediocre all my life. I know this because talent and success are relative terms, and every target I meet for myself will be replaced by a higher one. I know that objectively I should consider myself a successful and well adjusted member of society, but it’s just not that easy. In my early 20s I was a gigantic fuck up, and didn’t even realize it. You know your best days are behind you when you can point to a single moment in your life where you were both the happiest and the most disappointing.