1984

I like going the wrong way down one way streets. It makes me feel against the grain, like a tired anarchist suffering from a serious case of denial, a case I think I can win with perseverance and a positive attitude. Of course I admit the truth to myself, and whoever else may be listening at three in the morning when I wake up with a start from another nightmare featuring lizards and junctions and white noise in terrifying visual form. I guess in some kind of way I like being the delusional loser asphyxiating under generational devastation, the inherited indifference of the privilege and wasted pride of parents who dream the best for their kids, kids like me, sending them off to college and maybe even graduate school and feeling as though they are really going to make something of themselves, all the while me knowing personally I am doomed to repeat the mistakes of their parents, my grandparents or great grandparents even, the ones who pitifully drank and drugged themselves to death because the disillusion of a perfect world where they actually belonged was way too much to live with. The ex-patriot writers of the past, my situational and aspirational ancestors, had it right from the beginning because they accepted that they would never be accepted in traditional society but they made something of themselves anyway, a feat that deserves its own kind of praise because I’m fairly certain that I never will.