all I want in life's a little bit of love to take the pain away.
life is filled with dichotomies.
paper or plastic?
man or woman?
stop or go?
garbage or recycling?
hardcover or paperback?
happy or sad?
love or hate?
live or die?
laugh or cry?
these are the kinds of questions you ask yourself everyday. you ask yourself to choose. you choose to choose. there is always a choice. but sometimes the second choice is death. death is always a choice. there are two possible outcomes to every breath you take. I don't remember who said that, but they're fucking right. and probably dead.
sometimes I wish I could just not make a decision. choose to not choose. freeze myself. have infinite patience. be like the dalai lama and wait. good things come to those who act like the dalai lama. except when their monasteries are razed to the ground by the Chinese government. good things come to those who don't live in Communist China. and wait. there. that works.
but it's not me. torn between patience and the desire for instant gratification (or not even that - just a result, something concrete - good or bad). hunger pains without any food in sight, and without even the knowledge that you'll starve to death. uncertainty. I've had enough of that, thank you. pass the security, will you darling?
gray is not very becoming on me. black or white will do, thanksmuch.
I'm quite tired of waiting for things. I've seen some real bad shit in my day. I've stared ugly people in the face. not just Death, mind you, but ugly people, too. the scum of the earth. their offspring. bad stuff. shit that could turn you green. shit that could turn your shit green.
if there are 52 weeks in a year, and you live 75-odd years, you'll rack up about 3900 weeks throughout your lifetime. that's about 27,500 days. 655,000 hours. 39 million minutes. 2 billion seconds, tick, tick, tick. 2 billion seconds not counting up from birth, but counting down to your death.
maybe that's why I'm impatient. sure, there are a lot of weeks and months and years and minutes and everything in the average lifespan, but does that mean you'll see all of them? maybe I know something everyone else doesn't. maybe when people tell me to "sit tight and wait," my body is like, "fucking 'eh, man, I ain't got all day. I may be dead by tomorrow." maybe if your body tells you to not wait, you shouldn't wait. don't subdue those instincts. carpe diem. live every day like it is your last. fuck. eat. sleep. win. lose. cry. laugh. dance. run. lounge. yell. play. work.
I want to be able to wait for the future. I want to freeze myself in time, speed everything up. forget about the process, witness the outcome. be secure in the knowledge that things are either going to turn out ok or turn out shitty. prescience. omniscience. fortune-telling. but, instead, the future remains some far-off beast, the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. but it may just turn out that that there isn't an end to the tunnel at all, and the light you're seeing is really just the light of a train speeding toward you. death, speeding toward you. no afterlife. no happy ending. no retirement. no benefits. the future - a simple extension of the present. the status quo.
fuck the future. the future is just something those in charge made up to give all of us at the bottom something to look forward to.
like the future is going to be any different than the present. bah. humbug.
2 billion seconds ticking down to your death. a second for every single person on Earth who has ever died. tick. Winston Churchill. tick. Jesus Christ. tick. Cleopatra. tick. Gandhi. tick. Mao Tse-Tung. tick. Plato. tick. Gof, the Caveman. tick. John Clinkenbeard, Soldier of the Revolution. Turncoat Hessian. who fucking knows. I wonder if he had to deal with all this bullshit back in his day. doubt it.
Lately, you seem like another language.
Are you in trouble, are you in trouble again?
And you know how they say
the past is a foreign country -
how can we go there,
how can we go where we once went?
Have I been standing here for so long?
Nature's found a way of telling you that it was going wrong.