Sometimes you can’t get what you want

It really is hard to wear your heart on your sleave, but for some of us, it’s easier, mainly because we’ve had a good life. But sometimes, even we, don’t get what we want. In fact, at times like these we got so severely and extensively screwed over and demoted, we’re a potentially very cowardly yet bloodthirsty type of threat to society. The good news is we’re so up our own asses, we’re most likely going to eat those closer, socially and in terms of class, because we can’t even bare to look at the degrated majority. It’s not climate change or economic collapse that’s the imminent threat, but like WWII, it’s class cannibalism.

I figured early on that I am disgusted by the middle class and its attachment to an intimacy based on longevity and quality of life. In fact, I think anorexia is a result of being so disgusted by our own identity, we don’t even want to sustain ourselves anymore. In a world where food has always been plentiful and where affection was always available, true challenges are things like fasting or gambling with love.

Everywhere I go, middle class people strike up conversations. Sometimes I feel like the interaction was something significant, but it’s mostly just rubbing our common cultural references against each other’s leg. It’s almost like past lovers who end up resembling each other so much from all being avert to risk, you can’t even remember which is which anymore.

Whilst reading Faulkner at a coffee shop by the beach, I met a couple the other day who casually started chatting to me about art from the table next to mine. I can’t even make a sentence most of the time and I really don’t know why I keep bringing a book along, but it reminds me of the frail class humanity that we’ve been so obssessed about consolidating. Faulkner’s stories I can hardly ever follow, but it’s the intimacy of family ties intertwined with survival that keeps me company. It feels like, even though all these people interrupt my reading to do me the honour of identifying me as middle class, they have no idea what thoughts I keep in my mind. At least, I’m trying to remember what it’s like to need people, like we did before service provision made every human inter-dependence a money transaction and not to want things I can’t get or pay for.

At the end of these encounters I can’t help but think that the highlight of this pandemic infested climatically unstable summer was masturbation in front of the A/C confined class identifying space.

Immunity

Big pesticide polluter disguised as big pharma, environmental escalation past the tipping point disguised as a pandemic, quick read-through of abstracts disguised as expertise have been getting on my nerves lately. You could guess that fragile male egos would be the hardest hit, banging their head against the hard walls of patriarchy and eventually against their female tormentors, locked down together, one eternally tormented, one holding the key to a colourful flowery field where Britney Spears sings with Lana del Rey and J-Lo with Amy Winehouse under vanilla skies and girls sip strawberry margaritas whilst painting each other’s nails. Even post-mortem, femicide victims run eternally through flower infused fields, while their murderers stay in the eternal prison of their hard-wired brains hanging on that single moment when they finally found the courage to open up their girlfriends and claim the key for themselves. But they found nothing and now they can never figure out whether the key ever existed or whether they were lied to. Aww you little sad femicide humanoids, you can kill, dissect and dismemember like a medieval surgeon, but will you ever understand Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey? Law and order in the face of such mayhem seem so pathetic. Sure, hang on to your hard-wired patriarchy, like that worked before.

I had a shower in the middle of the boiling afternoon city and turned on the AC in the car so I wouldn’t sweat too much. On my way there, I bumped into one of the performers who just popped across the street to buy a beer. I joked that this is my favourite part of the performance but she looked at me blankly. I walked in an abandoned building I suspected had asbestos still lurking around. G. told me they had managed to find oil under this old building and threw a big piece of tar at me, but I dodged it. He kindly led the way to the top of the building through abolishment waste and trash. I was the first there, someone took my picture and smiled. I decided to go buy a coke and get a mat from the car. I kind of wanted to run away, but I didn’t. I laid out the mat and sat down drinking coke, claiming a space from which everyone hopefully leaves unharmed. A boy and a girl came and sat next to me on the mat.

The mayhem I had envisioned started coming to life. They wildly screamed like beasts, throwing and kicking things around. I felt so relieved that I didn’t even feel like I needed a cigarette. Covid was abolished as the least of all dangers present, the asbestos, the holes on the floor, the toxic materials being tossed around, the glass cut flesh rotting in dirt, the lack of shelter and above all the fury, while I comfortably sat in my little cosy corner, felt like some kind of repressed fantasy finally coming to life. And then the two female performers started getting slightly injured, progressively more so. I started frowning. Why didn’t I mind that the male performers had got equally injured? Why was this so unbearable to watch that I even covered my eyes with my hands? Why did I run with a bottle of watter and tissues to help one of the performers and why did she return to the performance after she cleaned her wounds? Why did they continue doing this? I guess I didn’t understand what “this” was. They were breaking their own personal hard-wired patriarchy and then they broke their social identity and finally came their humanity until they had lost their identity altogether and they had become part of their surroundings.

The thing is I kept thinking of the kind of effects their injuries could have and of the ecotoxicology-related long-term effects they might endure, even though I tried to push the thought away repeating “relax, they’re all educated, they probably already know”. Fuck, they don’t have the slightest idea, do they? or do they not care? Then I thought of all the times I had little affectionate encounters with each of them. It was time to walk out. I didn’t even say goodbye to anyone, I just kept thinking of the wet wipes I had in the car and getting there fast.

I rode away, but I knew that this was a warning and either I liked it or not I would return to the toxic things that surround us sooner or later. The pretty field was drenched in blood and poison and instead of Britney Spears, Derrick Barry was there holding my hand and comforting me.