What a crock of shit. Here I am, a relatively healthy guy in my mid-twenties, sitting around on a Monday, bored. How can I be bored? There are tons of things I need to do. Bills need to be paid, dishes need to be cleaned, carpets vacuumed, laundry washed ad nauseum in perpetuity throughout the universe. What is this weight that sits on my shoulders and stops me from doing what I know I have to do? It's fucking crippling.
My room is a fucking mess. Clothes are piled up, papers scattered around, tissues wadded up and overflowing in the bin. I almost cracked my modem in half with my foot earlier because it was buried under an old pair of boxers that I can't remember wearing.
I call myself a freelancer but really I'm a hopeless slacker. The reason I don't have a boss isn't because I'm some brave, ballsy sort that strikes out on his own, it's because I don't work well for anyone because everything they tell me to do and say feels like bullshit. I call bullshit on television and don't watch it. I call bullshit on the radio and don't listen. I call bullshit on fashion and shop at stores where you have to be a member because everything is so fucking cheap. I don't cut my hair. My beard is starting to look like something you could scour iron gates with. My wife's loving gaze is increasingly leaning towards weary tolerance rather than joyful infatuation. I can feel the walls crumbling, the ground opening up. The letterbox flaps and another raft of credit card bills come through, sandwiched between utility bills and junk mail offering me loans.
I like to think it's the state of the industry that keeps me ass-to-mouthing it (hand-to-mouth would be over-generous). I tell myself that my wit goes unappreciated, my genius unrecognised. The truth is I keep myself down because I'm pursuing a course that doesn't come naturally to me. The reason I have no motivation to be all responsible and domesticated is because I'm not a naturally domesticated guy. I live out of a fucking suitcase for crying out loud. I go to the launderette to do my laundry even though I own a washing machine. I live like a fucking hobo and secretly, when I'm not looking guilty as someone else picks up the cheque, I like it. I feel like I'm in freefall but without feeling free. It's a way of playing it safe while pretending I'm out there.
That's what I am. The 21st Century Bullshit Man. A hobo with a credit card. A bohemian with a mortgage. A rebel with a clause.
A friend of mine told me about how back in the Sixties his mother got offered a beautiful apartment by a wealthy aunt but she turned it down because she didn't want the responsibility. Everyone who found out at the time just said "right on" and went back to their oatmeal and incense. Nowadays if someone offered you property and you said no, even the fucking hippies would call you a dumbass. Oh the times they are a-changin' indeed.
That's the ache at the back of my mind. I'm going through the starving artist motions but I feel like a fraud. Then again, so many famously broke artists had rich parents or sponsors. Maybe the whole fable is a lie. Maybe I'm just riding the foamy crest of the dream and gazing into the jagged rocky mouth of reality. Whatever. The Beats rode in the back of pickup trucks and smoked grass with migrant workers. The hippies had Woodstock. The Seventies had disco. The Eighties had coke and greed. The Nineties had hip hop and nu-metal. Does anyone see a fucking trend?
Well here's my claim for the so-called Noughties. All the other decades might have their high and low points, but no decade before this one ever cornered the market on bullshit like we have. Jack Kerouac? James Frey. George Carlin? Carlos Mencia. Kool & The Gang? The Beatles? The Doors? Westlife, Boyzone, Busted. Woodstock? Facebook. Vietnam? Iraq. Watergate? Halliburton and KBR. Welcome to the Noughties, the age of Bullshit. You heard it here first. Take a big whiff.
P.S. Found this link. Whoever wrote this is totally right and I'd love to buy them a drink one day. http://www.internetisshit.org/index.html
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