Jared

Jared

Jared looked around the coney and felt light headed.
He hadn’t really slept well in weeks. He was stressed and no one cared. Those that pretended to care couldn’t change his life. Too many people are the self-sufficient type. His parents were the kind of people that made their own place in the world. That’s what people really want to see in others: self-reliance. It is the definition of adulthood. It is what your parents hope you’ll grow up into. You’re supposed to be some normal fucking person with nothing special to impute into life except your cookie-cutter children.

Jared wished he had stopped at the gas station and bought a cigar. He had been smoking way too much but when you don’t have medical insurance, you cope any way you can. On the tv was some bullshit presidential debate. These fuckers go on and on about how they identify with the common person but never the uncommon person. It made him feel manic…like one of those recovering addicts you meet every now and then. Their life is so full of shit to do…it’s cuz they fucked over so many people when they were wasted. You make an honest effort to fix your life and everyone wants back into it. You plan and plan…you’re always on the phone with a now normal life. Ha.
The waitress came over and told him he had to leave. He looked at his laptop and saw that the battery was almost dead. He had been there for 3 hours. Every writer knows that if you show up to a coney just after any meal-rush, you can stay until the next is about to start. You don’t even have to tip them. As long as you are kind and quiet, they don’t give a shit. You’re an easy table during a predicted down-time. He told her okay and started to pack his things.

It was balmy outside. The kind of hot that makes you feel like you are sweating the moment you step outside. Truthfully, it’s your body being so acclimated to the air-conditioning that plagues you. Had it been the 1800s, Jared would have had no trouble dealing with a breezy 87 degree day. He reminded himself of this and took a deep breath. Soon enough, he didn’t feel all that warm.

The sun was heavy, tho. He decided that he needed a cigar. The fucken corporate gas stations always charged more than they ought to. If you go to the hood, a cigar costs a buck or less. Go to one of the corporate gas stations with the air conditioning so cold that the bottled soda on the shelves is slightly chilled and you gotta pay an extra quarter or 2. Jared’s uncle says that he shouldn’t complain…just grab some change from his pocket and pay the piper. Uncle Dick never thinks of principles because he works at a gas station too. When consumerism pays your bills, you don’t bitch about it.
Ha.

The overweight Americans love terrifyingly cold stores. They always exclaim, almost shout, in relief when they walk into the store after strolling 50 feet thru the parking lot. Ahhhhh! Finally the kind of weather that slows the average heart rate to fat-ass levels! Let’s eat!
Oh well...Jared put his backpack into his truck and walked over to the gas station. Uncle Dick treats him like he’s a damn fool for walking a few blocks. For whatever reason, the American way is changing and becoming far lazier. Computers have eliminated lots of hard-labor jobs so what the average person is doing is less and less active as time goes on. Unless you work construction or in a garage fixing fucked up domestic cars, you’re probably in some building with a uniform on being a schmuck. You might wear a suit but what’s more uniform than a skyscraper full of dickheads and cunts wearing suits?

The gas station clerk was bereft of a personality…but most corporations don’t want their employees to be too real with customers. It’s not as if they want people to be pre-recorded messages on prompted calls to check your bank card balance, but they also don’t want someone to be loose and truthful with people. This is why fuckers go loopy and shoot up gas stations. What people are really pissed off about is not knowing themselves. They have to act in respectable manners but what employers want is a respected manner…and that’s entirely subjective and decided upon by some owner or board of nitwits.

What the fuck is wrong with corporate America?!?

Years ago they made good for average fucking idiots by offering stability and insurance. Now it seems they’ve given up being anything more than that. I bet that’s really all they had to offer. Corporations don’t go with a flow unless they create it or it’s so prevalent that even retarded babies pick up on it.

Jared left the gas station and felt the oven of 87 degrees once again. What a bitch…
He pulled out his lighter and lit the cigar. He always takes in too much when it comes to nicotine. Cough, hack, cough, and hack. He sits down and stares at the cars as they pass. He’s so isolated. People in Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor are fucking lame! The only thing worse than those culty small towns is a culty big town. I dunno, it’s not as if the status quo has a lot to latch onto. Art is a reflection of life reflecting art and, like it or not, tv is a version of life. People act like the people on tv to some degree because they are people. There’s something very similar about the characters that any given actor/actress plays. You are never not yourself. You get hired because you will play the role with that certain you-ness that you can’t escape.

We’re all on camera most of the time we are in public. If there’s a shooting you don’t want to be the fucking idiot looking like the fool instigating the maniac on the 10 o’clock news. Fuck, even the loudmouth recovering addict is a social stereotype. In a weird way, being different is hard. We all think we want a special life, but most of us settle for something far less. Even trying to be a rockstar or moviestar leads you to so much rejection that you end up taking a break.

Years ago, Jared was in a band. He went to shows and promoted his band and networked…all to very little avail. Then one day he was sitting in his truck ready to go into a show…he had a handful of promo cds and flyers but left them in the vehicle. He went into the show and got wasted. He didn’t talk to anyone but the bartender. It felt good to go back to just being a fan.

The music industry is built with almost no doors in. Bands don’t like to share the spotlight. Music isn’t communal anymore. It’s exclusive. You suffer thru the bands that play before the band you came to see and then you go home. When you see bands playing live on tv…a social rarity…it’s about that one band, not the tour…unless it’s a festival. Anyway…

Jared takes another drag from his cigar and gets a dirty look from some middle-aged cunt. These people…they jump from bandwagon to bandwagon as if it’s a virtue to shove ignorant opinions down everyone else’s throats. If there’s a news report about the adverse side effects of sitting, there are going to be thousands of people smugly judging you for sitting. It doesn’t matter what it is…people just want to agree with something that they didn’t have to put thought into. This is why people aren’t buying books and newspapers anymore. They just want instantaneous info in their head. They don’t want copies of anything. A digital representation of something will suffice.

Fuck, there was a science show on tv the other day about the great leaps and bounds being made in the science of imputing human qualities into a robot. Most sci-fi stories warn of the implications of creating artificial intelligence, but that doesn’t stop some verbose nerd from pushing that threshold further and further. The paranoid are worried that we’re losing control. The rational know that we have lost control as a species but that one day some verbose nerd will put it into context and we’ll all go back to being respectable creatures.
That future is being held back by politicians that can only raise taxes while business owners raise prices.

The future is obfuscated because the present is. All in all, the average person is treated as if they are only somewhat conscious of what’s going on. Wouldn’t that be great!!!!!?????!!...to be as clueless as a shitty actor and as stereotypically beautiful as a supermodel?

Jared takes another drag from the cigar and wishes that clarity wasn’t found thru stimulants and drugs. Yet, society doesn’t want to change into anything that they can’t help but change into. The only memes that are adopted by people….

…like rolling hills. You may not want to go up and down, but to go forward you must. Sometimes you don’t make sense and sometimes you lose your train of thought. But, like fucking someone…sometimes they mutter some nonsense but you keep fucking. Soon enough they will start making sense. You take a deep breath and hold back your orgasm. It’s just not time yet.

Jared is a fucking asshole. You sit around wondering if I’m Jared or if I’m actually you and you aren’t really you but Jared is a fucking asshole. With all the talk of common people and simplicity versus complexity…it’s hard to balance being a human and blowing your stupid brains out. There isn’t a person out there that is satisfied with mediocrity and happy that the big questions of life cannot be answered. So many people think that love is the answer because love led them to forget the philosophical path. Yet, if you fight it, you’ll end up like Jared: depressed, stressed out, and on the brink of death because life has no meaning. There isn’t some great purpose and the world isn’t going to end.

The big question has always been: Why me? Why does life feel this way for me? Why is my life unfair? Why me? Why me? Why me?
The answer is: Because you are you. Once you accept that you are you and you can’t escape that, most things won’t matter. Yet, being you sucks and you’ll never know why. You’ll fuck around your entire life and not understand what’s going on until it’s over. You get caught up in life and that’s why you get caught up on life. Maybe you’ll fucking die before anything makes sense, but on your deathbed ask yourself if you ever wanted it to. Beyond the idealized comforts you project ensue from fame and fortune, do you really want to be famous and wealthy…or do you just want to feel great no matter what? You want the latter. You want to have a job you like so it never feels like work. You want to never deal with the heart disease your family keeps dying from. You want to step outside of yourself and be something else because all you know fucking sucks but you don’t know what to know to really change your life…things is: You can’t unknow what you know.

You want hope and you think you need it. You think that’s what’s missing from your life. It’s not. What’s missing from your life is what you think would have been there had you made different choices. Deep down, you know you want to be exactly what and who you are…in the same position you are in now. You assume you are supposed to have some great answer to the riddles you plague yourself with but the cold, hard truth is that no one on Earth knows. The rich and powerful act as if they have the answers but they don’t. You assume having the cash to be a fucker all the time will make it easier, but by the end of the day, one day, you’ll be alone with your thoughts without the booze, drugs, or sluts to take your thoughts elsewhere. You’ll realize that it’s all for nothing and you’ll feel that same sting of existentialism that Jared always feels.

Maybe you’ll smoke a cheap cigar and forget that you are absolutely broke and surviving on the bare necessities like you always do. You’ll look at what you have and take it for granted because it’s not what you want because what you want is unhavable. You can’t obtain that which encompasses the infinite. Like everyone else, you waste your time with questions that can be answered but not in one lifetime. You keep doing stupid shit to make your bummer of a situation even worse and you can’t live up to the truth. You can’t accept the truth but it’s not enough to kill yourself over…so you live in some deranged stupor for years and years wondering why nothing ever happens. But fuck it…I’m lying.