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.