Work in Progress

We’re a new generation of fuck ups. We’re fucked up in a new way. We’re differently fucked up. We’re uniquely fucked up.

Generation Doom: is that who we are? We’re so fucked up. They sank us in debt. They locked us up. They muzzled us. They injected us with poison. What haven’t they done to us?

We’ve left everyone behind. And everything, pretty much. The whole fucking world. In some mad philosophical … spiralling. That’s left us all alone.

Except for each other.

Sure, except for each other.

 

What hope is there for us?

For us?

For people like us.

There is no hope for people like us. There’s infinite hope, sure – but not for the likes of us.

I’d much rather be a martyr than a suicide. More glamorous.

But who would know that you’re dying for a cause? I mean, it’s not as if you could infer it from your suicide: that you were dying for some greater thing. You’d have to leave some manifesto. Or tell someone.

Maybe you could explain. Deliver some speech ay my funeral, claiming me as a martyr. That could be your role.

A martyr to what? For what great cause?

You could say I died for the world. For the true world.

That you died to save the world?

I died to save myself from the world.

That’s not a martyrdom though, is it?

Could you ever go our with anyone not into universal doom? Who didn’t take it seriously? I couldn’t.

Sure.

I mean, I couldn’t go out with anyone who didn’t feel they were falling. Who weren’t desperate in some fundamental sense …

The sickness of evil. The greatness of evil. The evil of fucking evil. That’s what’s made us into the twisted fucks we are. Half self-loathing, half loathing everything. And full of some twisted messianic desire that things turn out right. And knowing that that can’t happen – not in this world. And wanting the apocalypse for just that reason.

Isn’t it sad, young people talking like this?

We’re not so young.

I think I might just set myself on fire in protest.

That would hurt.

It would.

Can you drown yourself in protest? It doesn’t have the same ring about it, does it? I mean how can you kill yourself in protest at something, but painlessly?

What are you in protest against?

Oh, I don’t know – everything. The world.

Why did they have to destroy everything? What did they have to destroy the world? Why did they have to spoil it all?

I’d just like to die, really. Right now. Painlessly. Wouldn’t that be something? … I wish the universe would just switch me off. Delete me. No, I wish it had already deleted me. I wish I hadn’t been born. I wish that I wasn’t here, saying these things.

Walking.

I wish that there wasn’t a South Shields and a North Shields.

What about the river Tyne? Do you wish there wasn’t a river Tyne?

I wish that there wasn’t a sky and that there wasn’t rain.

There isn’t a sky. That isn’t the sky. And the rain’s full of … shit. It actually scalds your eyes.

An absolute Revolution! A turning over the world! Blood and violence! Explosions and mayhem and everyone dying. That’s what you want. Some vast complete messianic transformation of everything.

Why are we talking about these kinds of things? What’s wrong with us?

What other things are worth talking about?

I’m from a different universe, that’s the truth of it. Maybe you are, too.

One where you’re alive?

An alternative universe, where things aren’t completely shit. Where it isn’t all going to the dogs.

We are the fucking dogs – don’t forget that. We’re the dogs at the end of the world.

It’s odd living at the end of the world, isn’t it?

It’s odd living after the end of the world. It’s odd living at a time when the world refuses to end.