The Loop

by Jeremy Robert Johnson

“Yeah. Which I know is fucking lame—like here I am, in my hometown, still mad at the rich kids and jocks and general psychopaths, and all the awful shit they got away with—but I can’t help it. When you’re a kid, that’s when you feel everything so much. Everything counts. Everything is as intense as it will ever be. Now, with this adult bullshit, it’s all so repetitive that a year disappears in a blink. It’s like I only half feel any day that I live, even the great ones. It sucks…

“What do you mean? The situation is the same as ever. The rich kids are just faster and better at what they’ve always done.” “What’s that?” “Using us. Throwing us away. And you know whatever’s gotten into them was made by some huge-ass corporation, and when the dust settles the executives will all get golden parachutes and float on over to the next empty spot waiting for some asshole to fill it, and all we’ll be is a footnote. A casualty statistic.”

“Yeah. It’s fucked up, but I used to dream of a day like this. Pitchforks and guillotines. The people’s uprising. ‘Eat the rich’ and all that. This scenario should give us carte blanche for that.” “But now?” “I don’t know anymore. It was only a fantasy. It’s like you get sick from the anger and the helplessness of living in this fucked-up system, and you feel like destruction might be the only way to shut it all down.”

That part.

“But when I try to picture a utopia, where we, like, all rise above, and we’re kind and we grow as a species, I can’t see it. So either I’m too dumb to have that kind of vision, or I’m just smart enough to know that humans could never pull it off. It’s way easier to imagine dystopia, and war, and all the bullshit we’ve been living in. But now that’s here, it’s right outside our door, and I hate it, and it’s weird, but I feel like it’s kind of my fault. Like I should have hoped for more. Done more.” “That

‘Every morning when you wake up, I want you to make two promises to yourself. One, you’ll do your best to stay healthy and keep living. Two, you’ll be as good as you can to others and yourself.’ And that’s it.”

Needed to re-read this one now.

It doesn’t matter what I think. He thought filthy, depraved shit all the time and told me most of it. Imagine the stuff he wouldn’t tell me. And he was awesome. So it doesn’t matter. We’re all fucked up.