Düsseldorf, March 5, 2019
They tell me: Stop smoking!
I think: I don’t wanna live forever, ‘cause I know I’ll be living in vain and I don’t wanna fit wherever... (I Don’t Wanna Live Forever: Fifty Shades Darker feat. Taylor Swift by ZAYN)
Black and white checkered floor, golden inlays, marble walls with opulent, sensual veins, wild coral, fringed biker jackets, an ashtray encrusted with Swarovski crystals.
You don’t want to live forever in these bodies that don’t belong to you, transformed by plastic surgery, kept alive by cold machinery, by electric respiratory systems activated by hasty nurses impervious to existential philosophical issues of vital importance. Corn-yellow hair, ravenous white teenage teeth and cheeks wrinkled like crocodile skin. A masquerade for everyday life. The beating of your heart monitored by an Apple Watch. They know when you are about to fall in love, when you are scared shitless, when you feel lonely as a dog and when you think about ninety-nine point ninety-nine ways to end it all in the lack of a tangible, buyable, consumable meaning. The wrinkles, the white hair, the television that no longer says anything interesting. But you will not be able to forget how you were. An infinity of images that sooner or later will fill you with horror, that you will no longer be able to erase. The sublime, seeing your reflection age in the mirror: the first white hair, the first wrinkle, the cheekbones start to sag, maybe a touch of Botox wouldn’t hurt after all. Ourselves or the others? Anchoring to the past, destroying the seabed of the present and making it impossible to react, to thematize, to classify, to salvage, to save yourself, to be satisfied. On Instagram (sponsored) the young American woman with gray hair says: ‘Hey, there are people who pay a ton of $$$ to get a look like this one!’ There are people who pay a ton of money for a bunch of things, and if all goes well they end up living in a (rented) car and subscribing to the newsletter of amazing cruise deals of Costa Crociere S.p.A., promising voluptuous interiors and Filipino waiters in tuxedos.
Average attention span... But on what do you base these statistics? My lack of concentration kills me and I do not want to hear someone-or-other tell me that in the year two-thousand-whatever we are no longer able to read complex texts the way we could a hundred years ago; a hundred years ago women didn’t even have the right to read complex texts. All kinds of senseless ideas come to mind, like: one day I would like to buy myself a big Macassar ebony bookcase and stuff it with failures of people I don’t know who get off on rubbing up against other strangers in those shiny crowds on Saturday and Sunday afternoons or during holidays in the big modern residential areas. Always the same story, the same stories endlessly repeated. A toxic mass, incomprehensible experiences.
You are not even the masters of your time, neither in the first reel, nor in the second. Endless corridors, drainage canals, labyrinthine crowd-marshaling passages, empty halls, dead-end stairwells. To get shut in or shut out. The deliciousness of failure (when others fail). Coming in second, third, fourth, last, and then feeling a grudge that knows no solace, that banishes sleep. Don’t make me stop smoking, don’t stop me from going outside with a glass or a glass bottle, don’t get me involved in your collective start-of-century crisis. The errors of the past weigh like millstones on future generations and then at a certain point they vanish, they dissolve in the void to make room for quotations in bad taste. And the errors are repeated. I want to write a history of errors.
I walk without shoes, they stole my Nikes at the dormitory.
Don’t trust men who use AXE deodorant and women whose hair smells like Pantene conditioner. Ice Chill makes me think precisely about those interminable party nights and the smell of bars that all reek of old lime, sugar and rum. * Sometimes I have trouble taking the person in front of me seriously. Open the window, let in some fresh air, it’s starting to smell like years, years of labor in here. Spaces get smaller and smaller. I’m afraid I will be shut inside. Don’t trouble yourself, let things go the way they must.
Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it has always gone on–that is, badly. (Animal Farm, 1945)
Let time pass, flow, take its course; who knows if sooner or later everything will start over, from the beginning; from the beginning of the beginning of the beginning; from the moment in which the end has been conceived. How frightening. There are no longer rules, just opinions. And I reply: ‘Give me your opinion!’
P.S. The tiger or doctor costumes, the one you get at Primark, are out of style: starting today, we will disguise ourselves with the skin of another, a different one each day, to know how it feels and to finally be in “someone else’s skin”. And to see if it’s still fun, anyway.
P.P.S. Everyone wants to go study in Cali-California, but I don’t know how to count dollars, dollars are all the same. They like beautiful things and I like ugly ones, things that are bad for you (figuratively speaking). I’m in the wrong place at the wrong time, as in a vortex of adolescent paranoia. Nobody understands me. Bad timing. Enlighten me with knowledge. The logo is nice, I like the logo, the logo represents me, the fake is not for me–yes, but they’re still wearable shoes!
