The Young Ones

People looked sinister to me today. Evil was surely afoot on a day when I had to go back to work ('cause I am, after all, the centre of the entire universe). I felt old on the way to work, my first train trip for 2009, with a bunch of teenagers standing in the other doorway, and I was pretty sure they were all about to break out in a mass orgy on the train and then belt people up.

Young people. They really are starting to look like another breed now, the little fuckers darlings, even without me calling them young people, in the way that old people do. It must be weird growing up now. I think if I was a teenager now I would go totally off the rails, crystal mething my brains out and putting my porn videos up on the internet. It was bad enough growing up in the eighties but at least redemption felt like it was hanging around in the air as a concept to grab onto if you wanted. I was a bit of a closet mystic even then. These days, I wonder how much harder it is to tap into the ether, even while spending a million hours online in it every day and oh, goodness, how old do I sound?

So I went to work and yea, it was boring. I transcribed an interview with a little 20 year old bastard whose details I am unfortunately not able to divulge, having signed a piece of paper that precludes me from putting him into some sort of electronic stocks (because you can't tell me that that's not one of the top 5 things the media has taken upon itself to be in this culture). Young people are funny because while they seem way less judgmental in some ways, in others many more of them seem way more inclined to rob each other at knifepoint and roam in gangs and root each other purely for fun and put it on the internet. But then hey, with mass generalisations like the ones I'm making, its obvious that I'm so way out of touch that what the hell would I know anyway?

So then at work I had a bit of a weird turn, because I'm still doing that detoxing thing and it's been going really fine, and yet today I had also taken a few other things as well and they all somehow bizarrely combined in a really shitty way that had me dizzy and nauseous, so that when I left work to catch the train I was thinking how irritating it would be falling down in the road and getting run over, or vomiting in the street, and then I got to the station and the 6.20 had been cancelled so I got to sit on the ground of Flagstaff platform 3 for half an hour feeling dizzy and trying to concentrate on my book but i was getting that horrible feeling the way I do when I try and read in a moving car, and gee this sentence is way too long, and the woman next to me had the most bizarre makeup on that made her look like that woman who's had all those masses of plastic surgery but without having had any plastic surgery. Sinister.

And so I came home and lay on the couch and thought how sad it is that I have wasted the whole day feeling sorry for myself and maybe my horrid detox experience was some kind of weird instant karma even though i don't believe in instant karma and i really don't like that song very much either, while we're at it, and oh dear, here's another long sentence, is this annoying to read?

So I've spent most of my evening feeling like I'm getting over that yukky nausea/dizziness thing, and I'm trying to redeem it in some way by doing something vaguely useful and so I have cleaned out the bottom of the fridge, which regularly gets water building up in it, because it's old and due for the scrapheap but i feel sorry for appliances and the way they just get thrust aside like an old Atari 2600 with a Pong cartridge, and so I just keep wiping it out every now and then and having to get a giant knife and smash the giant icicle that builds up along the right-hand side of it, an icicle so big i should transport it to Antarctica and it might help the polar ice caps to slow down their melting. And anyway, I don't mind funny little quirks. It makes things more endearing when they squeak, or leak, or belch (although I must say, now that Lester has gone to Mark's, the house not smelling like a giant fart will be pretty pleasant).

So while I was cleaning out the fridge, I was thinking a bit about the whole Mozambique thing and thinking what a cool thing that would be to do, and thinking about how sad it is that when Krishna, who is one of the guys who lives in the house on my block, came to my door to arrange a time for us to get out and get the garden back into some semblance of order, I felt a sense of pleasure that I could put that on my calendar, oh dear, that's very sad, isn't it, and thinking about how i need to start doing more things with my life and yet how, at the same time, i do so love how small pleasures are good pleasures, and while I might have laughed at myself once, now I really do appreciate the small little things that go into living a contemplative urban existence and I love that and don't care how daggy it is because it makes my heart swell, even though I also would like to balance out gardening afternoons by doing something daring like going to Mozambique and being selfless.

And so then I started thinking about the Touch Taste Smell Gallery and how cool that would be to start up, and thinking about how when I was driving to Jane's the other week down Melbourne Road there was an old building on the right-hand side that was abandoned, an old brick building, and how it was sitting in the middle of a field of crap grass, like an old abandoned Atari 2600, and a part of me (the excitable part that is still 25 and wants to go adventuring now, dammit, boring old bag woman) said, "Hey, that would be a cool building for a Touch Taste Smell Gallery" and then I was daydreaming as I do, with a cast of characters and dialogue and colour as is my wont, and I was thinking about all the pathetic little shithead teenagers that would come and blow their brains out with meth on the grounds of my Touch Taste Smell Gallery and try and rip off the artwork and so then I expanded the gallery to outside as well, with some sort of a garden out there and befriending some of these kids, and see, I'm not all totally crusted over just yet because even though so many more of the young people seem to be little bastards young people with ingrained low water marks, they still somehow managed to insert themselves right into the middle of my reverie and my heart does, underneath the unsettled beating that goes on around these strange people, bleat for them.

'Cause I wonder how many of them feel like they are as meaningful as an old fridge or an old home entertainment system, and how I do feel like that myself sometimes, and about how awesome it is to be aware of how fucked-up and patently ugly we all are and the culture is but oh, my, how I don't want to get sucked into that for too long at any one time because sometimes it just feels more obvious to me that the only thing that is gonna save us all is love, and Love, no matter how ugly we are. 'Cause love reminds us of how purty we are, too, and that's something the culture ain't going too flat stick demonstrating, so I guess it's up to us.

(See, redeemed myself in the end, a little, huh? ;)