Roaming, dazed. Unable to formulate a single thought. Marajuaned. Mary-janed. Stoned, but on everything, on life. Stoned on it all. Microdosing on everything.
Lives as living ruins. Where nothing was expected of you. Where you didn’t have to amount to anything. Where you could get away with it: a life on the dole.
And there were others, like you, getting away with it. Where there was a whole subsociety of those getting away with it, doing nothing in particular. Enjoying themselves dazedly. Late-morningly.
Getting up late. Sleeping until the afternoon. Barely seeing daylight. Living for what? Living, just living, without plan, without forethought.
No, we’re not alive! That denial. We were never alive. We never opened our eyes. We never came into the world. We were never born …
Ruined, from the first. Demolished, from the get-go.
Making mixtapes. Trading tapes. And science fiction paperbacks. Reading, yes, reading, in summer parks. Wasting our youth. Knowing youth as wasting.
Ruination was the law. Destruction – but not of a grand kind. A gentle sabotage and self-sabotage. Let’s not bother to live, we said to ourselves. Let’s not bother to try. Let’s not bother to bother. Never try to try.
Let’s never get with it. Fuck the programme. Let’s deviate. Wander off.
Always off course. Off living – like off roading. Living off. Dazed. Distant in the eyes.
Stupid – but with an impersonal stupidity. An idiocy that isn’t even your own. A sweet idiocy. A mute idiocy. The idiocy of all mute things.
Insignificant: that’s what we are. We are embracing the insignificant. We are lost in the insignificant. We don’t even bother with the worthwhile. We can’t even conceive of the important. We’re doodlers in the margins. Graffiti artists without tags.
We’re like rust. Like erosion. An impersonal force. A way things happen – or fail to happen, but not the happening itself.
Always on the verge of sleep, but dreamless sleep, unpromising sleep. Going nowhere sleep.
And light everywhere. The light from which we shrink. The light we distrust. The light we feel is looking, looking for something from us. The light that searches. Searchlight beams sweeping the world. We don’t want to be seen. Surveilled.
We want to stay out of sight. Attain invisibility. Walk between raindrops. Become incredible shrinking men and women. Who disappear. Who can’t be found. Who’ve always and already left. Who were never where they said they were.
Without fixed address. Homeless. Answering to no one. Going under fake names, under alibis. Except every couple of weeks, when we go in to sign on. To claim our dole.
Work in Progress 