With organisation of the masses comes regulation of the individual... Individual coerced into certain behaviours by collective force, he has all kinds of expectations, prejudices, and values, infecting the deepest substrata of his thought, that are not his naturally but are the suggestions of society. Society's expectations form an unbreakable hegemony, perhaps the hardest force in the world to resist. Values, ethics, morals, it seems their function is to obscure inequalities, to conceal unfairness.
Social organisation on a large scale entails coercion for the individual. There is something brutal about the idea of a nation state, something sinister about the notion of work as productivity, and that a permanent state.
The organisation and functioning of a given society, regardless of the political model it follows, must always entail a degree of force. Isn't majority rule a sort of violence against the individual?

Imagination as sleep. "Distracting me from my writing would be like rousing the dead from their sleep." Kafka. (paraphrase).
Writing for oneself: "The best things one writes are for oneself." Ginsberg.
The imagination sleeps and veritably dreams in the act of writing itself, which functions as a trance. Thereby the imagination casts itself upon an ocean of words, and may truly plumb the depths. I meditated on stillness and slumber, i let my story be a resting place for the imagination.
Therefore no more writing for others, to be popular, for friends, for a marketplace, to seem clever. When you begin to think, what if my friend, sister, hero reads this, you become self-conscious. The imagination is stymied and no depths are plumbed at all. My story becomes, once again, a resting place for the imagination, where it may wander and play at will.
Tools of the writer: pen n paper.
Hazards of the writer: excruciating loneliness, paralyzing isolation. Meaningless scribbles of the biro in the lonely room.
Personal faults: procrastination, never finishing anything, lack of faith. No productivity.
Why? Because to produce becomes sickening.

Finally end up not believing in the collective unconscious or collective anything. Humanity too diverse and heterogenous. Too much in dreams, too relative, diffuse and personal.
That's how they're best dealt with too; any theory as regards dreams too much like an imposition.
As i get older i more n more distrust theory and systems imposed on life, any interpretation of phenomena not having its basis in the integrity of the self, fully flexible and accomodating, fluctuating according to circumstances. This is "truth" if there is such a thing.
To see the uniqueness of each thing, and yet how it fits in with a pattern with other things like it, not bending things to a rigid rule. See Machiavelli. Byproduct of all this though is an awful uncertainty, a messy unpredictability which might threaten to overwhelm.
To live free of systems, something of Zen in all this.

It is not that i project anymore into the future and worry about it, at least not the longterm future, it's more that i feel the weight of the present and past too keenly, like a sort of burden. This is like a sort of central theme, fundamental to everything i write, and yet at the same time, one one level it's definitely bland and banal, like discontent of one sort or another generally is.
If i follow strictly my own line of subjectivity, i come to the conclusion that truth is impossible, that words are meaningless, and at that point, if i'm being consistent, i have to fall silent.
Then again, what if it's more banal even than that, that the truth doesn't deserve to be expressed? What a predicament the writer is in when on page one he finds himself thoroughly disenchanted, disgusted even, with expression, if he finds description itself distasteful...

If everyone was like me, and every student, say, held such stuff, such secrets, inside, then the world could not go on functioning for any length of time. Something would have to give, and me and all my confusions are only a sort of microcosmic reflection of that, projected down, as it were, to an insignificant scale.
Art is refreshed and made more acute by a refusal to be objective, but objectivity is sometimes relieving. Maybe it's essential to a self-concept, to a knowledge of the self. Maybe no knowledge of the self, no self-concept, is entirely possible. I've dramatized my own identity issues into a sort of rationalized debate about subjectivity and objectivity, but really i'm not entirely convinced it's a valid argument, based as it might be on a false distinction, and really the only conclusion you can come to in the end (after all this speculation) is that there is no objectivity and there is no truth.
If you be subjective and act subjectively though, is you try being, as it were, fundamentally subjective, you soon run into problems. Chief among these is an absolutely crippling, and if not crippling then at least enfeebling, sense of isolation.

I hate nothing so much as a cliché and always try my best to avoid them. In everyday speech i mean, and also the clichéd occassion is one of my biggest hates, or sources of discomfort. Thus it is that sometimes i struggle to express myself, as i can by no means avoid the clichéd sentiment, unexpressed as it may be.
A cliché is dead language, a sure sign of not just unoriginal thought but actual lack of thought, mental lethargy. I am only saying this for myself, applying these standards only to myself, out of a feeling of necessity.

If i feel acted upon, as i often do, as is inevitable, rather than controlling the outcome and the direction of my time, it will lead me to a feeling of fatalism, doom, anxiety... I will be anxious because i am acted upon rather than acting independently, to realise my objectives in full autonomy and the most precise reasoning, unclouded by the prejudices of others, above all unencumbered by traditions of authority, that decree how my life should be. My time is structured by others, by tradition, and thus are my activities, my loves, my very dreams affected and circumscribed. Others may have adapted to this. I never have.
I feel dirtied by the obcene tides of time, ever ebbing and falling, catching me and soaking all my labours with their stink. Hours and days flow past me. I jump through hoops, by someone else's decree, as though prodded into life by a jolt of electricity. I am not grateful, i am sorry and enraged. So much of my lassitude and misery comes from this ingrained attitude of looking at time, seeing the inevitability of certain actions, which arise as part of "playing the game", at the behest of others, not in accordance with me as an autonomous, thinking, independent being, full of awareness and reason, but merely as though i had been reduced to the status of an object that is "acted upon".

Of anything distinct from the world of sensation there is nothing that can be said for certain... hence my sickening uncertainty. I am not even certain of my loves or hates except momentarilly. I am an intermittent revolutionary, i even have sudden flashes of conservatism. But i am neither one nor the other. It is only the primitive type of man that loves wholeheartedly, or can give his passions consistently. But he is also happier, more fulfilled.
Those who have given their lives to an ideal, say a formalised and rigid ideal such as Christianity, are often content and may appear smug, considering themselves of the elect. But their mythology supplies them with a mystical, quiescent satisfaction. A man like me can only yearn for a satisfaction like that, because belief of any kind in absolute certainties is exactly what i find most difficult.

Everywhere around us now we see signs of isolation.
We hear isolating songs on the radio, see isolating images on TV, and hear from the mouths of
casual acquaintances isolating talk.
Our life is a state of tension, purposefully bent that way by the masters of our time, who are the masters of madness.
If i adhere to negation, inversion, it is partially out of cowardice but, more widely, out of a passion for meaning that is misplaced in our time. What i miss is certainty.
What i wish most fervently is never to delude myself.
I am in prison, it seems.

There is a big building and inside are thousands of young people thronged together. These folk are watching someone on a stage who is saying words relayed through a tannoy.
The words are like gas, like beige, like rustling leaves, like the shadow of a cloud that will pass swiftly on.
No-one will ever remember the words, not even the speaker. This speaker has a job and this is the commencement and execution thereof. The speaker collects symbolical money to feed an actual family, with all the resultant anomalies and strains. With all the absurdity, which the speaker has trained him or herself not to see, not to apprehend too keenly.
The speaker collects symbolical money. Symbolical money is transferred to a symbolical account. The speaker ritually removes some of it, invisibly. The speaker ritually collects actual substances, bestowing them to its children, the fruit of its loins. These children eat wheat and milk and butter and vegetables, soda and chocolate and candy and meat. At some unspecified later date, defecation occurs.
Thus the ritual completes and can be resumed once again, the speaker again taking her place, performing her activity abstractly, and being rewarded with abstract quantities, collecting fibre and protein to once again sustain the organism, to lengthen its life, for obscure purposes, to cast away its waste so that others may sort through it, and be compensated with gaseous quantities of finite invisible credit, descending ghostly like the holy spirit, merciless like the Olympian gods, all-encompassing like Jehovah's reach. Everyone swallows and is swallowed.
My heart does not even rebel; no, i only feel an urgent desire to vomit and weep.
.... but my Angel touches me on the shoulder, and says:
How bout no bosses? No juniors? No symbology? No abstracts? No power?
How bout energy? Violence? Lust? Exhaustion? Joy?
How bout no more co-dependent relationships? No more master and servant?
No more useless activity? No more meaningless toil?
How bout an endless party, full, replete with unbounded love for all?
How bout a new spring followed by an eternal summer?

Love is everything, a practical and passionate force. We should get rid of its bad connotations. It is essential to enact it as something strong and true. I feel that love should make itself known in the world like a rain of bombs, like a burst of shrapnel. I want to overturn authorities and stamp them in the dust not from spite but from love, love solidly embodied.
I want to become the agent of love, expressed as danger.
I call myself the enemy of fashion, of cynicism, of corruption, of post-modernism as a world-view and philosophical stance, of trivia. The antidote to all of this: the power of the individual, the strong feelings of the mass, love expressed through destruction.
(These thoughts are for K.S. 13/2/83-2/9/08)

What i want out of life is freshness, and to look on the world with loving eyes. I want to understand nature and then comply with it, that is, to do what is natural. But first i feel i have to understand the messages of nature, interpret her language in a way relative to me, so that my life can be enacted like a sweet gift, a natural progression, and not a loathsome burden. I want to be natural and self-assured.
I want to embody love as a living force, passionate and raw, not simpering and delicate. To harness destructive forces in order to love more fully is to me imperitive. I want to turn my love into a frenzy, to totally exhaust myself, and thereby know that i am fully alive. Destruction and love are to me related concepts.
I want to destroy.... in order to create. The contemporary world is absolutely loathsome and empty to me. I reject it because it cannot contain me. I believe that people should take power. Anger and violence directed up the class scale, from the bottom upwards, is to me the only legitimate and relevant anger. I will never again battle against people in the same position as myself.

I take the whole thing as an absurd joke. What i want out of life is an end to bullshit. I want to burn away the trivialities in my life and leave the essentials, the good and wholesome things, things felt and communicated naturally and honestly.
This is the task of increasing numbers of people.
I come remember from solitude and frenzy. My pride and constant companion: mortality.
The present tense becomes the past. I like becomes he liked. The fear of being forgotten. To love becomes to have loved. and so on.
Hence the endless recurrence of the same hideous traps, that despite myself i fall into.

And yet to admit of doubt, and doubt is the only real constant in everything i write or will write, even if such a language could exist, would the end result be interesting or instructive? And since our starting point is zero, a blank state, not interconnection but the gut instinct for connection cut off, refuted, how on earth can another soul be reached, be made to know?
Every case of conversion requires a certain brainwashing, and every "success" is of his nature, through the mere mechanism of being known, bloody-minded and predatory to the point of seeming abhorrently vulgar, tasteless. Insistence on superiority of a product, in an age which adores marketplace competition. The fact is that in rejecting all this you reject teaching and learning and a chance at connection, in words and opinions. In rejecting the marketplace you reject wider communication.
My messages can no longer be bright, cheerful, fresh, stylish, can no longer be attractively clad in novelty, like a nice, gleaming product, or even a nastily gleaming product. Maybe my product is unpalatable, maybe my messages are uncomfortable...
So here we have it: everything i write runs down to one thing; a wordless state, a pre-verbal act, a voiceless condition. Following the trail till the trail ends.

I think really that a new word or a whole new language must be invented for what i begin to feel. The old words seem empty, every one a cliche, as if to use them would condemn me, for immediately i'd be entangled in their morass of associations, their web of images. Not lively images, but rather blank, stale tableaux, arising out of mental lethargy.
But what i experience now, and for what it's worth this is an attempt to express it, is not a mere absence of fullfillment but something rounder, deeper, more intense and more tangible, more felt and expressive, making itself known insistently. Coming from all points of the compass at once, and occupying the whole sphere of what i call my life. To mention specific maladies would be misleading, as the root of each would only lead back to a greater cause, the main event, the prevailing curse of which i intend to speak. All problems are interconnected and together make a thriving sort of bacterial community which constitutes the self.
What's needed is a new language which takes as its first principle non-connectedness, seperation, emptiness. A language built in every case on the mutual cancelling-out of hope and despair. A sophisticated and useful vocabulary of feeling, with everything taken into account. Not dependent on the truly primitive semantic notion of opposites: espoir and desespoir.

The bitter arrogant souls of humankind, their unfulfilled potential! Too many of these pink fleshy probes wandering around through the city streets and in their precious cars, old-faced drunks sniffing in bedrooms, happy old ladies in bingo and memories and shopping bags, the billion upholders of the status quo, the thoughtless myriad throng waning and weeping in night and day, drunk kids laughing manically in blood-filled electric lust, all of them creeping like ants to their pre-ordained destinations, with thoughts of TV sex music food alcohol, all the yuppies of forever in clashing restaurants, and the students! Bloody, yapping, dumb little students light-headed and laughging at nothing, wet behind the ears, arrogantly ill-at-ease, stupidly relaxed and all-knowing. The cabdrivers and their fuck-witted tearful partners in dives and hotels, all the junkies in their cavelike abodes, the fat pox-ridden prostitutes with mean faces and abortions, the swish restaurateur with his new silken tie, the punk girls at streetcorners plotting some vacant doldrum, the brain-dead casual boys frozen in a violent stillbirth, the craggy-faced oldsters in caps and pathetic solitary meals. All of them asleep, awake, fighting, fucking, eating, drinking, talking, laughing, crying, till every activity becomes the same thing, every sound merges into the same neutral, high hum of life, and even the death cries and weepings of bereavement contribute to the constantly-swelling symphony, until finally the great sound, the great protest produced by all this humanity, becomes the same tone, huge, sublime, grotesquely beautiful, a soaring panicy spasm of the collective voice... It flattens out into the hush of the cosmos itself, as understated and calm as the distant sound of waves on the shore... And there's your communication, in which you are enmeshed and enmerged, and in which every protest you make becomes a newer tremor of its ultimate failure.

Every face turned away from every other face, coldly in their respective rooms. I sometimes wonder if even the luvvy-duvvy couples smooching on parkbenches can understand each other in even the remotest way, i wonder if such an understanding is possible. Or is it just the cold collision of alabaster statues accidentally, cold marble on cold marble, frigid flesh and heartless clay.
At moments of clarity like these i realise that my friends and companions are not just few in number, but that they are non-existent, that i am a lonely speck lost in a sea of lonely specks, each of us anguished and confused, bumping into one another, stumbling, mumbling, but never once communicating anything worthwhile. It's as if i go out in the morning onto the street and find it filled with plastic shop-window dummies who at intervals drop electronic, pre-programmed words from their frozen mouths, their eyes locked-in on something far away and hopelessly artificial. Their human souls have been swept away or lurk frightened within them, as does mine.

But i still fervently wish that there was some communion, some spiritual home for all the lost souls with something in common, that there was some way to reveal myself, announce myself as one of them, because such a thing is rarely possible. To be an individual you must run that risk, of being mistaken for a normal, like when i was in the record shop and going to buy Fugazi LPs, and across the way flipping through CDs is a lanky boy with short haircut and Dead Kennedys T-shirt, big boots. And, really, nothing can be done! I can't simply saunter over to him, grin, and flash my union card! There is absolutely no communication in the air between us, and to look at me he probably thought i was looking to but the latest fake indie rip-off band. No chance to reveal yourself.
We are all just nameless souls stalking through streets on our own, ghostly individuals lonesome in the massed crowds of busy streets, no matter what our things in common, our specific dreads and hopes and fears... It all becomes elliminated in the humbled mess of confusion when we meet, and we cast our eyes downward, afraid to speak, and move on...

And blank-faced kids in cold streets and subterranean clubs will perhaps one day just grow up, become fat like their fathers, spawn new kids to despair in another kind of void. They had their own mums and dads, in wall-papered livingrooms, that they grinned with and had joyful dinners alongside, and the kids are of the same earthy cultural cut as their parents, cut in stone, predictable as death, so that the sweet-faced girls will turn sour and embittered, and the brave young lads that were once so cocky in their jubliant gangs will end up suicidal in some garett on a bleak night alone. All of us immerised in the horrific mainstream, springing up like ugly mushrooms on the fungus of the millenium, accepting clumsily an inherited culture, like the outsized cast-offs of older siblings.
It amounts to a t-shirt and a record and a five-pound note wasted, to a nose-ring or a tatoo or a new pair of shoes, to a pass-time in empty rooms before death. Put something on the stereo to make yourself feel better, involve yourself in something greater, dream till your heart's exalted of great revolutions, and then sleep again in your cold bed. And all for what?
So you can be laughed at by cracked-faced schoolboys on concrete steps, as a sideshow, a waxwork, an ineffectual mannequin dressed in the borrowed clothes of old revolutions, never realising that a new revolution is needed, a revolution that rejects all the old cliches and starts afresh. Otherwise we'll end up the stock characters of sit-com jokes and vulgar cartoons, everybody's favourite public domain cliche, reduced to a caricature, ceritfied harmless. Guffawed over by ignoramuses, or simply sniffed at disinterestedly by all the petty vulgarians of the ages.

If you then want to play the freak, adopt that tired old role, then do it with truth and individualism, be exactly who you are no matter how difficult it is, never adopt any kind of a uniform. For to the powers that be, the ominpresent media that makes us dance like puppets, we are all the same, all subgenres and warring factions, just simply a tumbling dance of dumb kids ripe for exploitation with expendable incomes in their dumb pockets..
The big bosses of the big labels, the penthouse executives, the endless demonic souls in suits, can't tell a raver from a punk from an indie kid, but they can see dollar signs in all of these camps.

And the magnificent beauty of the underground is never glimpsed by such people. Because beauty is a simple thing, and all things beautiful are simple.. As simple as a happily-produced fanzine thrown out into the world for pure reasons, not for profit-margin, not for exploitations, but just for the love of it.. The depth and secrecy of the underground is what's startling, and the purity of its aims and actions, they way that the mainstream ignores the most intense, the grandest, the most beautiful parts of youth culture, simply because they can make no money from them.
And with what primal, simple innocence they produce their fanzines, labels, flyers, distribution networks, evilly childlike, purposely avoiding the light. And it is in that that there is a seed of hope. That true, vital independence, that violent dissention blossoming forth into different camps and genres, carrying out even within their own scenes furious secret wars, that the man in the street is completely unaware of..

The narrow belt of youthful rebellion in its present state is hopeless, no growth possible within it.. It may as well be all the same, a kind of blanket freakisness into which we are cast, and is just recognised by its disgust, its impotence, its modern-day frustration battling in a cruel, cold world already fucked-up long before we were born..
Mark yourself then as an outsider, set yourself actively apart.. Pierce yourself, ink your skin, dye your hair, get some crazy outfit... What good will it do you? It's an almost useless, impotent gesture in today's world, earning you sleepy stares and not much else... But if you don't mark yourself, set yourself apart in some way, the alternative is much worse: You'll become that most bankrupt, dead, hideous of creations, a normal person... Normalcy not as in desirable, healthy normalcy, but mediocrity like a creeping disease, factory-line facelessness officially rubber-stamped, tracksuits and trainers and video rentals and the National Lottery and the Sun and Coldplay, mediocre aims and mediocre happiness, bland wishes and no imagination, to live and die like an animal, without a loving heart, without an original thought. Anything is better than to be "normal", the incredibly bland, soulless, rigid national ideal of normalcy, which involves cadaverous grins in local newspapers, endless wasting of time in uninteresting pubs, every fakery and lie under the sun, every variety of bullshit imaginable, and the most brutal, cruel intolerance for anything or anyone slightly different or original...

There can be nothing worthwhile in the cellars and clubs where we hang out, if they have not this in mind, if we have not a proud heart for the future, if we are but the heartless re-echoers of old echoes, like the unwanted children we are-
Yes, t-shirts, yes, baggy jeans, or skatewear, floppy fringes, shaved heads, pierced noses, chains, graffiti, mohawks, longhair, eyeshadows, makeups-
A pre-packaged false display of puppetry and falsehood, amounting to nothing, a plastic sideshow- Is this rebellion?
Rebellion is a big grave for the baby-boomers and their failed revolution, which contrived to leave us abruptly, expertly, coldly, with precisely zero... but out of Zero all things can come.

What should i become then? I felt sick and lonely, sitting on the toilet, thinking about my fate... Never admitting that i was really worried... I saw myself become student-boy, happily engulfed in my selfishness, moronic in the best tradition of students.. I saw myself thereafter, happily tripping to a mundane job.. Could i really become that soulless thing, could i really put on that grinning mask and grin with all the other slaves? Awful to contemplate, the inevitability of it! Slow, inexorable agony of halting change. I was bored with my awful job and its stifling, prison-like atmosphere.. I distrusted both education and work with a kind of nameless terror, a repressed malaise i could never voice, an ever-present ennui that clouded my lonely days and goaded me into meaningless action.. I only felt that i must break out, enlarge myself, escape somehow from the factory-line, the expectations, the fascism of normalcy.. And i felt all this with an ominous dread, though i could sit aside it all and view it remotely, like a sour, despicable cancer cell under a microscope..
And the kids? What of them? At their hearts, they're no help. All that any kind of non-conformity may amount to is just another kind of conformity, slightly re-packaged, a little less bitterly predictable.. Is there no-one left but me to sing the song of youth, is no-one else willing to curse the past whole-heartedly? Only i will sing the praises of the blank, forgotten fashions of this loveless generation.. I want to recount the names of all the suicide generations, give them a heart to shine in the darkness.. I want to be done with adult impositions and tyrannies, with hippy punk pop rock n roll heavy metal dance, i want to burn away the filthy, stupid sixties and the filthier, stupider seventies.. Give me something that the postmodern cynic deems no longer possible, give me the new... Give me the 21st century as a curse or a blessing, but let's embrace it with an honest heart, eyes turned heavenwards.. Let me die in it, finally..

I saw myself loveless and loving in the big city, the big grey city with its sidestreets, alleyways, steps, and murders... I saw the pale gravel roads of its winding streets, the taxicabs, swearwords, and art galleries... I mooched about, lost, a tiny little atom in the vastness... Best of all is a Saturday at the height of summer, when all humanity seems to be crowded on the streets, walking the length of the street past department stores cheap book shops past the corporate record store and up beyond past the flags, regalia, glimpsing the absurd equestrian statues, cursing the drabs of dour Edinburghs where even punks are listless in dives alone... You can hear all the major languages of the world, in babbled snatches of street-speech, and all accents of English protesting when Scottish begins to sound like English begins to be American Canadian Australian, and it all sounds the same, merges into the same protest, the same primal baby wail, with lower dipthongs and tremors of African Chinese Mediterranean Japanese, the subtler growling vowels, the more earthy mantras of joy... All amounting to the same thing.. Near pinnacle street-scenes of blackened brickwork and steel, or ancient slops spilled down the castle-wall, and disgruntled cabdriver, and the backfalling brightlight Turkish shopcorners in the useless Haymarket, near the comfy 1920's flat with a tiny bathroom and outside are scrubbed-clean steps, bannisters, everyone is asleep inside or lurks at the back of the door, seeming depressed... So many phantoms in a city of phantoms.
Because at night, after closing-time, after the crowds have departed, the truth is revealed... When only the cold lights of McDonald's blaze blankly onto the street, everything shut-up, the proprietors huffily locking shopdoors, turning off lights... Lamp-posts shining near park-railings, cemeteries, advertising hoardings... In the small hours of the morning, in vacant lots at remote ends of the city, drunkards haphazardly gather for arguments, taxi-drivers turn their wheels sleepily, hard streetlight bounces onto hard concrete, and the blaze of electricity still buzzes like sap into sleepless homes... Sicksplashed sidestreets will be found in the grey morning, bungled refuse torn by fitful winds...

Where then is my happiness? Maybe it's just internal, brief gladness that you might have for some fleeting second walking somewhere alone, just a momentary feeling of numinous warmth or realization, not depending on any material possession but in fact surpassing all your thoughts of despair and hapiness and sadness. A more worthwhile goal than happiness or sadness is to surpass both happiness and sadness, this is the only goal that lasts and in fact the only one that can be ultimately aimed for. I don't believe for a minute that durable contentment and lasting peace can be achieved simply by building up stacks of posessions, all that'll happen if you strive in the straight world for a thousand years is that you'll find yourself trapped in a tomb of your own making, surrounded by the products of your own useless desire. The sensible thing to do is to pass by this clutter and go for what's lasting and real. This kind of goal is undefinable and unknown, it lies somewhere beyond.
Maybe, though, you can briefly shelter in the shade of your fake happiness for a while, but there'll come a time when you have to depart from that shade and embark once more on the road to somewhere better.

Was happiness the virtual videoscreen shining in the vulgar amusement arcade? Was it all along just collections of shiny technology and the worship of the plastic Barbie doll icon? Wow! Maybe happiness was my shiny comicbooks! Don't tell me it was my testosterone levels coupled with thoughts of Pamela Anderson sillicone? Was happiness my cable TV? Was happiness always to be distracted by bright and vivid technologies? Next you'll be telling me happiness was to marry the honourable wife and dutifully impregnate her in order to bring more poor souls into the world. Is happiness disseminated and discussed on the internet? Is happiness the MTV soundbite or the perfect grin of the politician? Happiness is silken shirts and mascaras, happiness is wonderbras and modems! Happiness the bright and florid fashions promoted by arrogant, vain, greedy little models! Is happiness the postmodern ironic joke in the glossy magazine? Maybe happiness is an ideal homes exhibition or a corporate skyscraper, maybe it's a stiff upper lip or a slice of apple pie. Maybe happiness is the police nightstick battering you into oblivion, or the handcuff that keeps you from straying. Happiness is perhaps the vain projections of love you have for some girlie, or the unproven idea that somebody loves you. This is all just clutter, just objects, just what'll turn up on the scrapheap someday as so much rubble and crap, as the money'll wear away and the corporations'll destroy themselves and your love'll die and you'll grow to hate the object of your desires and it'll be disintegrated away gradually, till you find that once again you're back at square one, alone, cold, you'll find that you haven't advanced one inch.

This cash in pocket, and the durability of your good job, is this going to seriously make you happy so that you'll forget your earlier thoughts of despair and cynicism and be altogether contented and satisfied? If only it were so.
You may get a rosy glow in your happy cheeks momentarilly, you might feel some sort of lonely contentment at the top of the pile as you fondle your monies and goods and give pretty gifts to the lovely wife, but maybe now and then in stark nights when you're bored with all your toys you'll turn around and look inside yourself and see a bitterly empty core, and then you'll submerge it and wake up again to the hopeful realisation that soon it'll be Christmas time again and you can have a cheery dinner by the rosy TV and kiss the cheeks of your joyful family with a tight and genuine feeling of comfort at your heart. Then again, once more, you look at the heart of all you have worked for and see that it is empty, that it was never built to last, and that in the final analysis you're still all alone and all your moneymaking and empire-building was built on nothing but the flimsiest and most pisspoor and wretched of foundations. Then you'd be bitter and dissapointed, then where would you go?

And the beautiful notes and lovely shiny coins you'd be blissfully happy with entombed silently in the brooding high street bank! That you got up and sweated for in bleak mornings for to keep a roof over your head, but say you were commited enough and capitalistic enough to actually become affluent and respectable and have an actual surplus of respectably-earned cash, or a big bundle accumulating slow interest in the cold bank, so you can eventually over time be wealthy enough to afford houses and family, or, not even going that far, you can just afford more bottles of beer and clubs on weekends so that you can be spoiled into the illusion of having a respectable and happy young life, and can be free and put fat downpayments on shiny consumer durables, and at the end of the day sit contented after a hearty meal in your super deluxe kitchen puffing merrily on a cigarette, secure in the knowledge of your stable bank account and your accumulations of worth and wealth building up fatly. And that new-found power and responsibility you can have to enter the big high street store or some shiny shopping mall and gaze around at the stacked-up lovely appliances glinting in harmonious displays, and you can nod around and appraise them with your greedy eyes, fondling your tenners peaceably, dreaming of luxury as you trod daintily over the smooth floors. Shoppers are always sharklike and dumb, prising forth shiny credit cards from secretive pockets and slapping them down on dumb cashdesks in front of the polite icemaiden shopgirl. Society recognises money and the signs of it, and people like plush and shiny things, smooth star trek doors sliding aside, ambling into big electronics stores where are multitudes of big TVs and fancy camcorders and the unhurried affluent smell of big bucks and leisuretime. Silent PCs buzzing in corners, brooding DVD players all state-of-the-art and impeccably shiny, with smooth ranks and rows of CD-roms and lovely buttons. The fat consumer sneaks in and gets excited by all this, dreams of shiny cardboard boxes, bulky like the gifts under the Christmas tree, shiny rustles of giftwrap, sparkles of tinsel, rustled globules of aluminium and the stark and cold-hearted screen of your computer and the endless fantasies and chitchats discovered therein by the click-click of your fingers.

So eventually you have reached the point where you have a set of shiny polished qualifications which prove your intrinsic worth to the world, and are finally ready to take a job. Then you'll have a real thrilling feeling of worth and acceptance no doubt, working hard and being normal. You'll get up early and be restless and worried and this time you'll have a legitimate excuse for being loud and irritable, and you'll be proud of yourself as you splash water on your dumb face and rush out the front door, saying, "I'm late, i'm late, i've got to work, i've got to work!" There you are then, spending all day in your lovely office or wherever you are, getting tired feet serving awful patrons in cafeterias or friendly bars, being happy and smileish with the rest of the efficient workforce, or scraping by with some menial bit of storework and musty shelfstacking in backrooms and near iron grilles in your uniform, now and then a big commonfaced boss coming and glowering at you while you're dreaming of paychques and sultry Saturday afternoons, and then you get home exhausted pulling off tired shoes and collapsing on weary beds and then making yourself a mean microwave dinner which you slurp up gruesomely from a plastic tray and maybe you'll peruse the daily paper telling you of all the latest sex murders and chaotic wars before you shudder restlessly back into sleep before facing another cold day: "humph, so this is the dignity of work." Employment and steady work are worthwhile goals of course but not meaningful ends-in-themselves. They're just a necessary evil way of feeding your stupid belly and paying your dumb rent, and are neither dignified nor wonderful. It's all just the drudgery and weariness of days, i've met very few people who had jobs they were the remotest bit happy or satisfied with.

But let's just say that you go through all the rigmarole, all over again, work assidously and seriously, what do you end up with? You're at home one dull morning and the thing gets thrown through your letterbox to flop uselessly on the floor. You tear open the envelope and pull out the glossy, shiny computerised certificate inscribed with your tiny little passes and failures. This means that you turned up at the correct time for the exam and went and sat down with the perfect right amount of contentment and the proper degree of anxious worry, and, by luck more than anything else, you managed in spite of yourself to remember the correct amount of facts and figures and were able to present them in a clear and precise manner which showed the expected appearance of thought of knowledge. This is what qualification is a result of, this silly balancing act taking place in a short period of time as the last act of a long period of studiousness and rote learning. For myself, i always found qualification to be meaningless. I saw no connection between myself and the numbers and letters on the page, and i couldn't fathom what i had done, or failed to do, to gain them. I knew that my performance in exams was almost always bad, mainly due to my lack of interest, or faith in the subjects i was studying. So i never felt one twinge of excitement when i received my results, in fact i was ashamed and tried to hide them, while i knew other kids who had their's framed and stuck on the wall.

And does this system really work, if we followed their system every step of the way what would we actually achieve? If you went to college for a hundred years, with a perfect attendance and rigorous application to your studies, would you really be enlightened and wise, and a fuller human being, at the other end? Really what is the point in sitting in these rooms for years, scrawling hurried notes, remembering fact after fact, rules of grammar and syntax, the historical facts of what war was started by what tyrant and when, or learning over and over that two add two equals four and therefore the universe is the way it is. Just sitting on your bum, learning specialised rules for the formal understanding of a very specialised subject so you only have to do what you're told and jump through hoops in a standardised way (in the form of an examination) to be rewarded with a's or b's and other little formulas. An A is not always a sign that you have understood well, but merely a sign that you have seemed as if you understood well in a very formal, standardised way. You can have the best understanding in the world, but if your organisational and presentation abilities aren't up to scratch, you'll still fuck up in an exam. I'm proud to say that i failed every exam i ever sat, one after the other, until i just refused to sit them any more. Maybe education is just a formal contrivance for occupying the time of young people and training them as a workforce, and isn't meant to be in the business of teaching them one useful thing: The only useful things i ever learned from a teacher were the mechanical rules of reading and writing. By the time i reached high school i began to be filled with the babble of science and grammar and mathematics and algebra, which, taken together, served absolutely no purpose, nor did one good or benificent result arise from it.

If i could only bring myself to submit one piece of my heart or soul to the process of education. The silly rigours of a timetable, the hatefulness of cafeterias and clammy stairways and dumb study rooms, having to trundle in, wincing under the strain of tomfoolery. Everybody wants to see the disgruntled teen become the happy boy, everyone wants to see him become miracolously popular and confident overnight. Maybe they want him suddenly to forget despair and be pressganged into the pigeonhole of the happy young adult like the kind you see in commercials being cliched and bright in a fun world full of trivia. Your friends and family of course want to see you become happy as larry with the pretty girl on your arm.
It's awful to conform to stereotypes and the most wretched and pervasive of all stereotypes is that of happiness. When you play out the clichéd role of the happy person you'll achieve a fake and fleeting happiness that'll last for perhaps a day and a half, at the most.

I had been thinking of college a lot. This seemed to be an absolutely inevitable thing which everyone seemed to expect of me. Everyone wants the cliche, all the family wanted me to be the happy student setting off boyish and glad to catch the bright bus for youthful follies far away, plodding my trainers in dull mornings on the grim and dusty concretes of work and serious routines of education. Higher education was a course of action that i didn't even feel able to avoid, even though i fretted and felt worried over the decision and in fact regretted it every step of the way. Just bleak blank fate and you can't avoid it.
It's terrible anyway to find yourself suddenly encapsulated in a classroom, just dumped uselessly on a comfy seat and taking careful notes and then you have to roam out into the labyrinthine corridors and look out at the pale frigid windows at the monstrous steel battlements of the grey annexes and forlorn buildings outside..
And see all the languid and sweaty boys and girls fooling about like wheezy blondes, laughing gladly about their participation in 21st century nothingness near the geeky, unhurried lecturer blinking under brokendown lights. You can sit wearily in the wretched library casting glances around at this or that paperback, worrying anxiously about grants and discounts and how to get back home on less and less money and the rustly scribblings of dumb paper... You can perhaps even spy the popular girls from afar like you did back in high school, yet remain forever apart by your own inexorable and silly choice.. It's better than nothing i suppose but only just. It is indeed a blank, perverse twist of fate.

I was up there in the upstairs bedroom scribbling my notes, in 1997, while outside in the blue dusk of misummer i could hear the football crowds returning home in noisy cars and blowing triumphant horns, huge klaxons trumpeting out of the evening far away on busy roads... Made me look up startled or partially interested from where i was writing... I used to like to sit up there as the sun went down and write letters in what must have been springtime.. Somedays i would walk down some dusty gravel path and end up at some bottom byway road on a grey park bench across from a moody shutup petrol station at eight in the evening. And then trundling back home to listen to music in the dark. I would listen to the Ruts and Mudhoney, stereo propped up on a chair beside the lowly bed with its rumpled covers and later i'd tune in the buzz of static radio frequencies to listen to some dumb programme.

If it were only possible to "sieze the day" like that old cliche.. Though it's only in retrospect you realize there was something to sieze... Now, at this moment, what can i grasp? It's always fleeting, transitory, perhaps illusory...
On a summer day like today, i can smell in the wind something that could or should be happiness, lightness of spirit, love... And an attempt to sieze it? To capture it before it fades, as it must? To think that i'll have lousy memories, half-choked with grief, of some summer day like this, as i lie sweating in some lonely bed twenty years hence...
And then to know, finally and completely, that the apex of what i hope and yearn for is already gone, dead, finished, that the reflected eyes i see are what may as well be dead eyes, and that every tremor and passion i feel only contribute to a general tumultous, calamitous, empty symphony of failure.. causing a buzzing racket that tends to obscure purity, little drops of which can here and there still be felt..
It sickens me to be burdened with memories, each one useless and warped, each one attached to some unseemly emotion.. It sickens me that i am so sentimental as to entertain disgust with the world, and can't bypass it all with some trick of the mind.. God knows i have filled myself with every kind of drug and distraction, every two-bit pleasure, god knows i have tried to train my mind into positivity, as if it were a dog jumping through hoops..
But i keep coming back to the same question; Which is better? The world seen sober or the world seen drunk? And, furthermore, which is realer, which can i take to my heart and believe, how does nature wish me to live and die and love?
And i have my answer: i must look at the world through sober eyes, untarnished by artificial means of softening, as it really is. And in this state, a great stretch of boredom lies, a world of empty days filled with bittersweet distraction, from more numbness and deserted rooms, from hostile eyes, from coming home through windswept streets, from sleepless nights, distraction from the underlying knowledge that in the face of all this i am already faceless, voiceless, nameless, and that in the midst of this blank state i am slowly killing myself.

Oh sweet apathy. Shield me from thought. O blessed torpor, revelations send endlessly in halting dreams. Short line briefly crossed, my own personal pain wallowed in. I am cut off... It's true i have purposely cut myself off from society, quite concretely and with much forethought.
I have thrown off religion and have stumbled into clumsy and unseemly agnosticism, really the hallmark of the age- (No strident atheism or vicious fundamentalism for me). I have thrown off control, and i live lawless, a germ of freedom in my solitary heart.
I will not prostrate myself before the codes of law, and Hammurabi's pillar
Is only like the aggressive hard-on of an old fool:
Laughable, unimportant, now impotent. I pledge allegiance only to my empty self;
I burn all banners and tarnish all earthly idols.

And next, to integrate myself? To become one with the masses, the great streaming electric void of them, to become like them and to rush onward with them?
The thought is frightful- I can never be so vulgar and so apathetic and so thoroughly sap-minded and lazy that i should torture a nerve into the artificial state of optimism, that i could force myself into sociability, betray myself into those old stinking traps again and again..
Because a part of my heart is missing, and i can only see the vistas blankly, as cold as ice, ever-betrayed by my own squeamishness and lack of trust.
In every beat then, what waits? Noose, blade, to topple off a bridge, to choke myself with poisons?... An attempt to nullify a blank state, which is already fully nullified, so that the stretch of life surpasses even death. Don't protest! I feel that it is so.
... The Ultimate Failure of the Grand Plan.

How often have i contemplated time and wondered about the self and sought escapism and preached blankness at myself. Stared down death, made a thankless religion of isolation, meaninglessly purged and disgusted myself?
A blip on the screen, a spot on the map, bored, shiftless, needlessly revolted at my surroundings.
Action becomes aggression, automatic, arbitrary. Alienating. And how uselessly have i contemplated and dreamed and divorced myself from society...
My options are either to reject society or to integrate myself fully within it. What does the rejection entail?
Solitude. A frenzy of emptiness and grim repetitive rehearsals, always stealing myself to the point and never accomplishing a thing. As if freedom from my own monstrous complexes was an accomplishment.
Rejection of society is wise but isolation can never equate with freedom. So it is that i have maimed myself, away from the curse words of State Church Job Family, away from bland triumphant Ambition, but still the jumping dog of the bountiful money-god.
Jumping endlessly through the same decadent hoops.

But Michael, you might object, you have to eat. You have to have a roof over your head.
And i answer (tongue only partly in cheek) is the function of a human then to earn money? The human body is certainly built to eat, and it ate before McDonald's, before the institution of any bank or currency, before a standard minimum wage. To eat and seek shelter is certainly natural, but to equate that with the thoroughly unnatural and unnecesarry paraphernalia of our financial system, etc...
It's an illusion to think that the one dependes upon, or cannot exist without, the other. Because the tone and purpose of our society is not sustenance but, an almost opposed idea, gluttony. The emphasis is not on shelter but upon protection for acquired products...
(spin out these ideas ad infinitum nauseam...)

Is it possible to do nothing? To need no-one? To write about nothingness? Answer that with a glance from your window...
The novel as blank sheet. Art with its tongue cut out. Only then will Art speak the truth.
I'll get rid of my paperbacks and CD's... my TV, my excess clothes, my magazines... Live in a bare room, one lightbulb, a mattress in a corner.
At 7 A.M. i'll rise, have a cup of tea, set out for work.
At 5 P.M. i arrive home and heat up a microwave meal. Till it's time for bed at 10:30 i sit in a kitchen chair and stare into space. When i receive my paltry pay i pay rent and purchase food.
On weekends i sit in my kitchen chair and stare into space. The ideal life! No risks, crime, violence, no potential for danger, and above all no hope, no art, no poetry, no love.
What is the ideal, the proper function of a man? If the government, for instance, were to pry into a man's life what would its ideal be?
The ideal citizen i think should above all be productive and have a sense of purpose. To this end he should be healthy in mind and body, not given to excessive violence or lust, and unquestioningly accepting of every tenet and principle of capitalism.
The ideal citizen i think is lower middle class- so as to feel the occasional sting of poverty but not to be completely enmeshed in it- and should have social aspirations. He should be moderately centralist liberal in politics, steering clear almost instinctively of anything "extreme". He should like football, television, and nights out with the lads. University education? Probably but not necesarilly. What's important is that he should be a productive unit in the economy, pay taxes, and be obsessed with earning money to buy products. He should at some point (ideally when interlocked in a chain of pressures, economic, social and otherwise, which make him likely to continue such a level of "responsibility") acquire a partner and start to consider reproduction, to supply the state with further citizens. He should finance his twilight years with his own money privately invested in a sound pension scheme, and should die not after the age of eighty, quietly and inexpensively.
What is my problem with all this? Doesn't it seem reasonable enough? You get a degree of fun, entertainment, a modicum of fullfillment?
Merely that i reject it all. Simply that i detest and disbelieve it. I have no political or philosophical basis for what i say. It is an instinctive, clod-headed, clumsy aversion, having its basis in nothing more than spite and perverse boredom. Yet i reject the ideal citizen. I constantly buy products and enjoy (short-term) consumerism and yet in the same breath i reject consumerism. I reject making money. I reject marriage and the siring of bairns.
I reject it all out of sheer perversion.

Those of us who are "sensitive", or are considered to be, are under a kind of curse. Those of us who are habitually untidy, in the whole sphere of our lives, are left with strange options.
What will the intelligent kids do with themselves? Left too often in some bare room in a rented DSS flat: bare bulb, paperbacks in a corner, confusion, too much thought.
My room a ghetto, solitude. It's easy out of sheer confusion to envision a rope around your neck, your tongue forced out. It's sheer confusion that does it, although you may scrawl "despair" in your note; sheer confusion, wordless foreknowledge of future disaster, indeed a prescient and informed loss of faith in the symbols of the modern world- And isn't that the point? That it's all too easy to lose faith in our modern icons, our empty ideals?
It would seem unusual if a loss of faith did not occur. Those of us who have tried desperately, heartsick, to succeed, may succeed in at least this.
After the lights go out, and morbid thought begins... sudden visions of the rope.
What did the young man die of? Sheer confusion.

After all, what is there for young people these days?
Vile, blank hedonism, moribund, zombie-like consumption of endless trash-
The falsely beguiling zigurrat of rotten capitalism-
No idealism, not a trace of something that can be passionately believed in, nothing to die for...

And so, the bare facts of my life: my birth, the seperation of my parents, my school problems, my childhood games, Oakely, my dad's paintings, the Socialist tradition, the Catholic church, my friends, my instability, my foolish infatuations, my failure upon failure, to lead myself somewhere worthwhile, to get a proper job, and more importantly to sustain belief in having a proper job, to reconcile my contradictions, to make something of my "gifts", to accept my own foulness and lack of grace, my own huge indecision, in short my failure to conceive even a portion of belief or hope in everything i see around me- My hopes for the future: none. My loves and hates: none. My achievements: zilch. My dreams: a blank state.
Too blanked and sated to be passionate about anything.

And myself as a lump of flesh, not knowing particularly why i was brought into the world, sees the lack of sense, the bare abject state of everything.
In other words a life without meaning. Can't play out on my own wall those rigid old stories anymore. Stories are just a means to amuse oneself. Like talking to yourself in a corner.
'Member Shakespeare said all the world is a stage? Well what i wonder is who are the audience and are they deriving satisfaction from such an empty and meaningless production? And moping mumbling actors like me, under-acting, making futile gestures, asking myself unanswerable questions.
The audience must've left long ago. More likely there never was an audience.

Christ, so long the paragon, looks somehow subdued. And in this state i've suffered too long.
Then what's left? Bare self-promotion? Building up wealth? Preparing for death?
This is the state of a secular life. For centuries, there was a ready-made mythology, for artists to slip into, albeit laden with dogma and laced with intolerance.
A completely secularized artistic state, or a philosophical one, is founded on uncertainty. Is its first principle humankind? Lost confidence even in that. Mankind as a virus infecting the planet.
Our first principle must then be the individual. Merely personal musings, insubstantial fluctuations of the heart. And our "way to heaven", our "salvation"? You might say there never
was such a thing, that it's all an empty myth, but at least it was a goal, and a goal whose spirit was perhaps more important than its substance.
So, what to do with my soul and what to give myself to? Shall i give myself to TV? Give myself to videogames? Give myself to endless gorging of an appetite? Give myself to myself, to my own caprice and whimsy? Give myself to love, another disproved myth?
The good old libertarian Aquarian approach would be to give myself to "an ideal"; some principle, some humanitarian cause or other, or such a vague idea as "freedom", personal or general.
America has got "liberty" enscribed on its coins- But what is the nature of that liberty? Liberty is an end in itself is a beautiful idea, but a deceptive and unrealistic one. Personal liberty, for me, is great up to a point. How do i stave off the anxiety that comes from such a surfeit of freedom, as a thoroughly secularized, too-well-read, disappointed western man of the 21st century?
Coping, as well, with the layers of real bondage and lack of freedom i see in this country.
My problem is that it's hard for me to enjoy things.

But i'm bitter, and in an ugly mood. Perhaps you shouldn't listen to me.
Maybe the influence of all those bad novels and records has told on me.
Dostoyevsky is too close to the bone. I have ruined my own life, out of spite.
I sit here with my meaningless conjectures, and my broken heart. Inamongst all this squalor.

But here i'll put another rejoinder- Becasue the gist of what i've said below seems too negative. Of course healthy and happy relationships can exist, not contaminated by any of the aforementioned bullshit.
I'm merely pointing out the subtle, clinging, contradictory nature of the pressures that are inflicted on young men like me, and that certainly don't work towards mental health and personal contentment.

What's almost never mentioned in clinical circles is the preposterous kind of burden placed particularly on young men, of the type described below...
A pressure reinforced not only by male peers, but, more particularly and acutely, by females as well. A crushing and absurd "double burden" of its own: The pressure to perform countermanded by the wish not to be too pushing, as society (and the boys and girls themselves) demand that to appear normal and socially fulfilled you must engage in relationships, but to go anyway toward getting a relationship you have to go to the most absurd lengths, arm yourself with dishonesties, be prepared to wheedle and cajole some girl into a loveless fuck, in short be willing to go to any lengths of indignity and dishonesty to score points on someone else's social scale.
But at the same time you can't be too strident, too passionate, too involved, or you run the risk of seeming obsessional. And these two pressures are always jarring against one another, the pressure to perform hindered by the pressure not to be "abusive"- not to impose unwantd desires on some unwilling girl, the kind of thing heavily censured by the same society that demands exactly that degree of heavy involvement- the old love and romance swindle endlessly perpetuated by the media.
This results in a morass of contradictory and negative feeling, the sexual impulses checked, the emotional development retarded, a checkmate, a stagnant position. Hence i think so much of the suppressed fury and degraded impulses of the male sexuality...

Over and over again i solemnly abjure myself to be truthful when dealing with others, to present a true picture of myself, and, when i come across contradictory or unpleasant truths in others, not to meekly back down... Why do i always end up submitting to someone's presumptions and stupidity, their narrowness of range?... In order not to be thought badly of, i end up doing and saying things i despise.
For instance, i meet a friend in the shopping centre and the talk turns to girls. At the drop of a hat we slip into the old language, rehearse the same tedious routines, the old macho bullshit. Naturally enough the talk becomes coarse if not obscene.
But the truth is i'm tired of these rituals and was tired of them even at fifteen. "Prove you're not queer by talking luridly about girls and sex" is the underlying motif. A stinking old swindle and one familiar to every boy.
I wish that for once and for all i could be honest with people, tell them honestly what i love and hate, taking into account the whole breadth of my doubts and complexities, and damn the consequences.
But perhaps honesty is not socially desirable.

To plunge yourself into blackness, to eat despair, is dramatic and dangerous. That kind of behaviour might get you noticed.
Instead i content myself with a cowardly existence, skulking in my corner, neither wholly happy or desperately unhappy, passionate about nothing, my loves and hates alternating and cancelling one another out.
Sometimes the blank agony of it hits me, the staring horror, the cutting dread. But still i allow nothing to show outwardly- I go placidly to bed, and fall into a numb stupor. Typical behaviour.

On the other hand, love is love. And who am i to say that those who love earnestly, or amuse themselves simply, are wrong?
Who am i to presume that the heart of their happiness is empty, just because it seems so in my case? Projecting my own discontent, my own blankness, onto those around me?
And dismissing "fun", "having a good time", "partying", really seems awfully puritanical and very much like sour grapes. And i'm really not so harsh and judgemental as all that.
I can only mention my own experience, and i can only describe in all earnestness the hollow feelings i have had and still get when attempting to "socialise"... The morning after, all the money blown, pissed up against the wall, puked up yr stomach lining, sour taste of old cigarettes, wake up with vomit on yr shoe... The awkwardness of crowded clubs, loneliness in a room full of strangers, cracked laughs, idle jokes, pensive cynicism...
As if born with something missing, the Human Link that connects people and makes them effortlessly mix and conjoin, casual, relaxed, facetious...
How often have i felt all this to be the epitome of emptiness.

And hence my banal repetition of a banal word, "death"- mirror image of myself.
Hence my denunciation of all values, my insistence on following my own awkward and fluctuating caprice, my self-contradiction, my sour grapes, my bile, my bellyfull of spite-
And thus i conceive of Art as a weapon, poems and words like a hail of bombs, incendiary devices, blasts of shrapnel. Catharsis, bad feeling exorcised. Art is a weapon i can bludgeon myself into lucidity with, a blade of connection, a cutting edge of release.
A weapon to kill off the unnecesarry, the exploiters, the liars, all the deathly clingers-on of aristocracy and priviliege, but also a weapon to enliven, and bring to birth the nascent revolutions-
Which will be revolutions of the spirit, pure or foul, wholesome or degraded, but in any case having their basis in what is passionate, powerful, and true.
And that's my ideal, to contravert, to undermine, to deny, to destroy in order to wholeheartedly create. Free of the burden of guilt, the complexities and absurdities of a dead culture, the weight of babyboomer nostalgia, the deadening cults of cynicism and frivolity.
Am i all alone in this generation?

(Self-fulfilling prophecies, banal rhetoric- Endless self-persecution, flights of wasted energy, arising from deserts of solitude-)
Why is my response to the world a violent one, a disgusted one? Why is the impression i get when i look out into the world one that makes me sick?
What is it that prevents me from having that ordinary, commonplace connection, that all the other boys and girls, the ones who aren't mental cases or suicides, seem to have?
I can't understand the impulse to create, to have fun, to laugh, to "party"- It seems so desperately out of place, so vaccuous, so meaningless. This is the flavour i get from youth culture. Devoid of thought, endlessly spun out, all based on someone else's cynicism, banal and frivolous.
On the other hand, i can very well understand the impulse toward nihilism, destruction, anger, and out of this comes a kind of social connection, and the only one i can really relate to. Hence my flitting around the edges of the hardcore scene.
I have my own dark forms of fun of course, but having that kind of fun held up as an ideal, the cliched fun of parties, alcohol, girls, dancing, has always seemed to me to lack something when put into practice.
When you get to "the centre of Saturday Night", you find there's nothing there. The truth blankly uncovered. The rotten facts revealed. A conspiracy to pretend that love exists, or that sex is an end in itself. Striving for things you will never have, in the midst of a void.

There is no "establishment", and nothing to be established. The current landscape is a void.
A glut of products- Who says that artistic endeavour must result in a product? Who says that thought, love, beauty, desire, all that is best in the world, has to result in an entertaining product, guaranteed to sell? Is marketing the apex, the whole point, the function of our civilization?
Every product demeans itself. Every product, by being a product, is somehow disgusting, complacent, self-satisfied.
And yet the message of our society is that to have human worth and fulfillment you must produce and consume products. The typical feature of this production and consumption is its emptiness, its endless recurrence, its monotony...

My sickness is such that it reaches out spasming, a black hole, a hollow gut. With rain in it.
Or merely slugs of condensation, in any case bitter and black.

Ennui, self-doubt, alienation, semi-despair...
These are the main features of the post-modern landscape, these are our inheritance.
I think that life without some greater good or goal to aim at is meaningless, and that the cultural products of the present Western society are cynical, isolating, always ringing hollow.
We can't get by merely making ourselves one big parody, based always on a false image. Like advertising imagery, a succession of things that never happened to anyone.
Or movie imagery, a parade of false ideals that make all ideals false.