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Nancy didn’t see the value in any of this because it wasn’t part of her world, a very tangible world of cause and effect. You work for long enough to cash in your tokens for a week in Florida. A localized world where you meet with friends at a pub and order an Uber for the way home. A world where you rest easy at night knowing that you had a kid, created meaning in what is inherently meaningless, and can enjoy the blank spaces that life will offer.
You can make up for mistakes made along the way; time lost; hearts broken. You can stitch things together—make sense of what went wrong—bring meaning to what is inherently meaningless and condense things to their proper terms—where those around you can look past the mess you’ve made and only see how you’ve come to frame it—in terms that are brilliant and meaningful. You create beauty in meeting dead-end girls and having dead-end sex in dead-end relationships; this wasn’t time wasted, this was time making art. This is what you tell yourself in your kitchen, in the middle of the night, as the
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She’d always ask if I was happy with how things turned out. What a question. Where do you begin? “Well, not because I stuck around…not because I didn’t go on these inauthentic, pretentious adventures…” Where do you begin explaining that we’re living in Hell? That to a highly-trained eye, which I possess, there are major differences in the singles market of 2012 compared to the cursed singles market of the current year? How modern men are more disposable than ever…where you like your little fucking town and you never wanted to leave. Has she seen the little fucking art studio and the toy train
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This is how things were always going to settle for her, etched into the hollows of time. Ride the bus until the wheels come off and then hop out the emergency exit. When your culture never promised you a future, you take what you can get from the present and destroy the rest.8
A good writer is tasked with splitting his veins open with a razor blade and covering his keyboard in blood, a prolonged and terrible ritual. You’ll know a piece is finished when your face is numb, eyes unfocused, and body trembling. You’d think Delicious Tacos would have something like this—the horrible reality of being on the writing grind—considering I learned it from reading his work. The only writer worth reading is an honest writer. How close can he cut things to actual reality? Actual reality may seem like hyperbole to those who read garbage, but anyone worth being a member of your
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Revolt against the modern world or revel in its destruction? You feel owed this for every bit of shit you had to eat. For every disappointment you’ve suffered, for the promises broken, for the deliberate subterfuge in the form of memes embedded in a pop culture that you still consider warm and nostalgic; you’re the institutionalized prisoner, the slave finding comfort in his chains, Patty Hearst with a machine gun. So far off-course, buried under relentless waves, carried out to nowhere. You were wronged by a world encouraging exploration and experience, and now that you finally got your
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