The Echo Chamber Lies

Generation Y in the developed world, focusing here on North America, spans those born from 1980-2000. I was born in 1991, smack-dab in the middle of this emerging clusterfuck. I prefer to refer to us as the Fight Club generation - it seems like we’re all either as duped as Project Mayhem makes all the saps out to be, or we’re aware that the meaningless filth pushed upon us we call consumer life is a bunch of garbage but feel powerless to change our circumstances, and thus manifest depression/anxiety orders instead. We are the children of the first batch of middle classers spoiled by plenty. For us, enough is never enough, because our parents inherited more than enough and didn’t take the time to plan how to make it last. I won’t pretend I’m an exception, I am all of the worst products of my environment. I, like my unknowing compatriots am also a narcissistic idealist. I am my most liked profile picture, I am my new fucking khakis. I know that these are outward lies, and personally don’t feel like I embody them, but their delivery to the outside world has been natural for so long that it is constant. The language I speak to others and the language I speak to myself are two completely different sets - this I believe is indicative of the Facebook Effect.

Anyone who started building their profile in early adolescence has been engaging in a subtle mind game with deeply pervasive effects. Every person’s own profile constitutes an idealized version of their social self. All the fun and best friendship you want to boast to the world is trimmed and clipped and perfected over time and finds a place in the content we share on facebook. This person is a character based on ourselves. This character evolves over time parallel to the development of our actual self, but is rigorously maintained on (frequently) a daily basis. There’s no problem with this alone, but the Newsfeed introduces an interesting new dimension. By semi-frequently scrolling through the latest relevant posts, we consume a huge amount of information which gradually becomes a picture of the aggregate social and life experience of our extended friend groups. Here’s the false floor in this whole orchestration that we let slip in our minds and hugely distorts our perception of our cultural experience. The image we build of those around us is an aggregation of their own ideal characters, but we don’t build this image through the filter of our own idealized self. We view it through our own stream of consciousness lens, grounded in the significantly less impressive true world reality. This allows us to know other’s facebook projections are superficial, but still consciously feel our own life experience is somehow inferior to that of nearly everyone around us. 

At the same time we’re the benefactors of the most incredible technology ever diffused by mankind, and somehow still perpetually unsatisfied with what we have. This is the paradox of choice. To use a simple example, there was once a time when if you decided to buy a pair of jeans, there one pair for men and another for women and that was basically it. With only one or two options, you’re thoroughly satisfied by whichever you pick because it is reasonable to believe you got the best one available. Today when you go to the aisle with jeans, you are faced with an array of 50+ styles and combinations - bootfit, straightfit, slimfit, blue, grey, black, acid wash, ripped, zipper/button. No matter what you ultimately decide, or how long you take to choose, when you leave the store you can’t be sure you didn’t leave a better pair behind. You are less satisfied with the product in the end. Expand this concept to the world of the smartphone. No amount, type, or quality of information is ever going to satisfactory enough to feel like you have exhausted the capability of the product you own, and so we choose to use them constantly and endlessly while complaining the entire time. 

Facebook, iphones, these are petty squabbles and I feel lesser for picking these particular bones. But they point towards a bigger question that I feel is worth pondering.

Consider this: Surveys by the University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future study of high school seniors (conducted continuously since 1975) and the American Freshman survey, conducted by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute of entering college students since 1966 showed the proportion of students who said being wealthy was very important to them increased from 45% for Baby Boomers (surveyed between 1966 and 1982) to 70% for Gen X and 75% for Millennials. The percentage who said it was important to keep up to date with political affairs fell, from 50% for Boomers to 39% for Gen X and 35% for Millennials. “Developing a meaningful philosophy of life” decreased the most, across generations, from 73% for Boomers to 45% for Millennials.

Except for a very fortunate few, nearly every person in every generation pre-WWII had their lives dictated by need. Securing the means necessary for self-preservation and personal fulfillment were not guaranteed to anyone, and the struggle made most of a persons choices for them. Whatever time was left over after the basic needs were acquired could be spend developing a life-philosophy, but ultimately this philosophy was less important for being satisfied with your position in life because your primary roles are predetermined by scarcity.  A child born today to a well off American family in a good neighborhood can decide to do literally anything they want with their life once they reach the age of maturity. How impossible of a question is this? Here’s this huge, infinitely complicated world, and you have the means to go anywhere, study anything, and choose to influence events in whatever way you believe is most apt for your well-being. How should I go about developing a set of values which will give me clear goals that I can feel truly fulfilled after accomplishing? For one, we all have the knowledge that no matter how proficient you are at anything, no matter how many hours you pour into practicing any skill-set, somebody in China is better at it. Then even when we do accomplish something notable, when we are commended on our aptitude for something valuable, we can easily find ourselves questioning whether that is the best use of our time or just a good one. These answers can only be reached by seriously committing oneself to finding satisfactory answers, and then investing in them wholly. We all undergo this daunting process whether we are conscious of it or not, however if we do not make ourselves conscious of it and pick it’s direction then we are quickly led down the path of least resistance. Doing what’s easy is our default position, and if one is not careful you can spend a whole life on it. Cheap short-term fulfillment abound, but they won’t deliver in the end.

We are the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War - No Great Depression. Our Great War is a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives.

It’s no secret that the full regiment of drugs prescribed for ADD and ADHD have permeated university campus’ across North America. The brand names Adderall, Concerta, Ritalin and my personal stimulant of choice - Dexedrine - have become part of common conjecture. All modern students speak the language of study-aids, whether they choose to partake or not. Lots of students have very strong opinions for or against the use of these psycho-chemicals, either asserting that they work in as competitive environment as any other and should avail themselves of every advantage available, or contrarily that taking drugs to study more efficiently is academically dishonest and that pride in one’s work can only be derived from the success of sober creations. 

This discussion does not pose to support one side of this argument or the other, but instead to lay out some of the facts accrued to this user through lots of experience and experiment. First of all, let’s talk about the differences between those compositions that a readily available on the underground market. Concerta and Ritalin are Methylphenidates, which function primarily by preventing your brain from re-uptaking neurotransmitters that stimulate dopamine production. Dopamine is one of the neurotransmiters we know the most about, and are fairly certain it is integral in regulating mood and wakefulness. Re-written in simple english, Concerta and Ritalin keep your brain flooded with the things that make you feel awake and content, the “feel-good” chemicals. 

These two are almost always described as useless in anecdotal reports by casual users. Even at high doses Concerta and Ritalin give mostly backround results, meaning that a user will probably work harder than they would otherwise but won’t be conscious of the fact that they are on drugs - arguably an effect largely similar to the expected placebo effect after taking any pill which is expected to deliver focus. The real gold exists in Dexedrine and it’s super cousin Adderall.

Dextroamphetamine, commonly known by it’s brand name Dexedrine, is the most classic stimulant prescribed by doctors for decades for a range of different symptoms, most recently and popularly for those related to ADHD. Closely related to Methylphenidates, Dextroamphetamine works by almost the same mechanism as Concerta and Ritalin, however it does so much more acutely. It primarily will prevent the re-uptake of dopamine, however at higher doses it also directly causes an increased release of dopamine and serotonin, leading to much more pronounced effects in the user and a greater euphoric response - the shit makes you feel great while the crank in your head turns 10X faster than usual. Perhaps the most intriguing, and frightening, effect of this drug is that a person who is suffering from extended sleep deprivation, or the similar feeling produced by being extremely hungover, will feel for 5-6 hours after taking a significant dose as if they are operating on a great night’s sleep and be fully functional. Amphetamine = speed, except when you get it in the form of prescribed dextroamphetamine rather than regular street speed you can be assured of the purity of your dose. The US military issues dexedrine to air force pilots and special forces soldiers when they need to remain high-functioning during extended periods of active alertness. This shit is no fucking joke.

Adderall is perhaps the most interesting of all the available compositions. Perhaps the best summary I’ve heard of the difference is that dexedrine is all about being made alert and focused, while Adderall does this as well as making the user feel distinctly euphoric. The medical difference here is that dexedrine is prescribed to youth who are already academically inclined but struggle with attention, while Adderall is prescribed to kids who hate school in order to make them feel fucking great while they power through math homework. It’s chemical composition is essentially 3/4 dexedrine (different amphetamine salts all based in dextroamphetamine) and 1/4 mystery amphetamine salt. That 1/4 is the primary difference between the two and is responsible for the significantly mood-elevating effect of Adderall. Arguably this is the holy grail of study-aids, however I’ve decided I prefer Dexedrine because it is easier to choose not to take after periods of extended excessive use.

The medical jargon can make all these drugs sound pretty innocuous. Additionally the common knowledge that so many of our fellow students are taking them on and off to help get through their workload makes them seem very casual indeed. There is some truth to this, as any user who does not acquire a prescription is unlikely to hurt themselves too greatly because their supply is limited by cost and availability - they will likely only take these drugs to help finish a specific product, and are less likely to use for many consecutive days. Those who get their hands on the ever-elusive prescription are placed in a different set of circumstances however, and it is here that the confessions which give this discussion it’s weight are found. 

———————————————————————————————————————————-

It’s 5AM on Wednesday morning, and I’ve become tangentially aware that the sun will be coming up shortly. This does not bother me in the least, there will be time for sleep somewhere in the unforeseeable future. Everything that happened between midnight and now is a homogeneous blur of research on the topic I’m writing about, research about the million other things which are occupying compartments of interest in my head, writing about my assigned topic, facebook chat with friends in other time zones about all those other topics of interest, and many, many cigarettes. Itunes has been playing constantly, and I’ve obsessively constructed 3 different playlists with similar but meticulously distinct vibes to guide different phases of this creative process. All I want to do is share the wealth of knowledge at my fingertips with someone else who is as jacked up as I am, but given the rest of the world is fast asleep while I’m being more productive than I’ve ever been I’ll have to settle for the satisfaction gleaned from typing as fast as I can. I took 20mg at 10AM Tuesday, another 20 around 3PM, another 10 at 5, another 30 at midnight and 20 more just an hour ago for a total of 100mg consumed in less than 24 hours. I am prescribed only 20mg every 24 hours, but have rationalized that I should divide my generous allotment into short periods of excessive use buffered by extended periods of abstinence. I have consumed such a massive dose not because I feel so much pressure to complete my academic tasks that I would be unable to do so without, but instead because THIS SHIT IS FUCKING AMAZING. I’ve been chain smoking both cigarettes and pot, self-medicating to try and cut down on the visible shakes and my tendency to massacre the inside of my cheeks while I’m on amphetamine. I’m getting more work done than I have in the entire semester, and I feel like the smartest person awake at 5AM. I’ve never felt as capable or confident in the accuracy and importance of my work.  At 9AM I finally change gears, stand up from my den of intellectualism and take a shower. I have a midterm at 2PM today, and I’ve spent most of my time studying for it. I pack up, and head outside for what feels like a re-introduction to reality. I force a muffin down my throat, not because I’m hungry but because there is a voice somewhere far in the back of my head reminding me that I haven’t eaten since I took the first dose and that my brain is fueled primarily by caloric energy and secondarily by amphetamine, not the other way around. Light is crisp, sounds are sharp and I feel like I can sense the activity of bugs underneath the ground I walk across, mentally organize and manage all of the traffic I encounter, and speed walk all the way to campus. Head down, headphones on, furiously texting all those who are just starting this new day. For all my heightened alertness, I don’t recognize a single person I pass on the way to school as a sentient being, rather they appear more as objects passing through my perception. I get to campus, set up camp outside the room where my midterm will be held, pop another 20mg and settle in to review the 100+ pages of notes I created last night. Time flys on study drugs, I quickly find myself finishing the midterm almost as soon as it was handed to me. I walk out feeling like I absolutely crushed it, and walk across campus to participate in a debate in front of an audience on one of my favorite topics - drug legalization. An hour before the round is due to start I take my final dose, a whopping 50mg all at once, in order to power through this public speaking experience on 30hrs+ no sleep. The irony here is palpable. I stand at the podium, sweating buckets, speaking faster than any person could reasonably be expected to follow about the value of drug use and the injustice of prohibition. I shake like a junkie who hasn’t fixed-up in days for the entirety of the speech, and perhaps too flippantly ignore the views proposed by the team I’m supposed to be engaging with in preference of my own, clearly superior views. We lose this round.

Here’s the problem with stimulants of every variety, and study-drugs in particular. They feel great while you’re on them, and then at some point you have to decide not to take them for awhile. On the busride home I embrace the feeling of being a shell of my former self. I’m drenched in sweat, stink of cigarettes, and the energy required to fully process a single thought is enough to make it hard to stand up and make plans for what I’ll do in the next 20 minutes at the same time. Finally I find myself back where I started this adventure, on my couch surrounded by butts and binders. I put my head down and close my eyes, but big block letters appear in the darkness that read “YOU SHALL NOT SLEEP YET”. Because I can’t do anything else, I turn on a television series I’ve downloaded, figuring I’ll fall asleep with it on. 10 episodes later I’ve fully embraced this insomia-ish state. I’m not asleep but I’m certainly not awake either, just present. Moving from couch to bed cements my position on being bound for unconsciousness. After 2 full hours of fruitless masturbation it’s dark outside again, and I have no idea how long I’ve been awake. Eventually sleep finally washes over me, and I have disturbing dreams for a full 24 hours. When I emerge from my bedroom, the look on my roommates faces is all it takes to frighten me into abstinence - at least until I have a solid footing in reality again and I can abandon it all for another intellectual bender. 

Study-drugs, the right ones, they work. Better than you would ever expect them to, they are absolutely the generic “go-pills” that should be the stuff of science fiction. Whatever you do, you’ll do it better with legal speed. Taken responsibly they give the user a gentle mental boost as well as much greater confidence in one’s own ability to accomplish any task. Taken recklessly they can set an active thinker on fire and allow them to burn hotter than the sun, harvesting and smashing and grinding divergent ideas together much like the elements of life at the heart of our most important star. I’ve had 3 experiences in line with the one outlined above, where 2 or 3 days are run together by extended amphetamine abuse. I walk away from each better off academically, intellectually, and spiritually, but not without great consequence. You don’t have to crash until you either run out of pills or choose to stop taking them. You do have to come-down eventually, and the longer you wait the more likely you are to find yourself eviscerated (or worse, dependent). Use with caution.

Dr. Gonzo, signing off before embarking on another journey to the heart of the psyche.

        Wall Street billionaires, and yes, even those meager millionaires complaining about their $250,000 bonuses, get bailed out for defrauding millions of Americans and causing a global financial crisis that will take generations to recover from. Contrast this leniency with the one shown towards poor black males in urban areas, where is their “leniency” when possession of crack cocaine carries a 5 times harsher punishment and jail time than the same substance in powder form? What’s the difference between these substances by the way? Demographics. Powder cocaine is used primarily by rich white people. Crack, by poor black people. What’s the “solution” to America’s drug problem? Incarcerate poor black people. But maybe that’s not the goal. Maybe its not the drug problem that’s being combated, it’s the people themselves.

         There is an argument to be made that drugs in themselves should be legal, but that debate is long and complicated and can be made another time. For now lets focus on some commonalities and continuities. The United States of America has one of the highest incarceration rates of its own citizens in the world. President Obama’s administration recently declared that due process has nothing to do with judicial process, and that the executive branch has the legal right to assassinate US citizens without a trial if they can be deemed “enemies” or “terrorists.” That’s fine if you trust the whole benevolent dictator idea, but that’s hardly what I feel like betting on, having, you know, met human beings before. So where is this going?

        Let’s take a look at the larger picture. As far back as the 1800s, European powers (read: white powers) ceased being content merely advancing faster than many other parts of the world. They wanted to conquer the world, strip it of its value, define humanity on their own terms and enforce it with impunity. Thus, Europe acquired colonies. They established divide-and-rule tactics throughout the Middle East and Africa (I’ve never studied Asia so maybe we can leave that alone for a while). They stole human beings, black human beings, as commodities for practically the first time in human history (slavery had always existed but it was primarily in the form of indentured servitude, where the slave was able to either fulfill their service, marry into the family, or buy their freedom). The world, in short, became their puppet. By 1883 the Middle Eastern philosopher al-Afghani had commented, there were few corners of the world un-interrupted by European interest.  

        The West began to see their mission of raping the earth as a righteous one, guiding those poor black and brown people to salvation. They were hardly the first to view conquest in this way, the expansion of Islam had similar imperialistic undertones, but this one happened to exceed all others based on its sheer scale and context as such recent-past.

        So where was I? Ah yes, the save-the-heathens mentality. The middle east can’t govern themselves lets do it for them. Africa can’t govern itself lets intervene. South America is made up of brown people?? Throw them in the pot too.

        We are still seeing imperialism in the middle east. The controversial viral sensation “Kony 2012” shows that “Africa can’t help itself lets do it for them” spirit is still alive and well. Latin America…well lets just say we’ve fucked that up. All of these “underdeveloped” nations we want to save, are that way because of us. Lets stop trying to save them and let them save themselves. They are capable of it! In the meantime lets try to stop locking up our own. Who is the drug war for? Certainly not the people its incarcerating. Who is the prison system benefitting? Not black people. Not poor people. They’re the ones locked up. Lets look at the people not locked up. Lets look at the surprise felt by many when Martha Stewart, a white woman, went to jail for (gasp!) violating the law. Many go to jail for less. Many receive the death penalty for less. And yet, many have now defrauded almost half of the planet and not only lived to tell the tale, but live to sit in mansions on private islands they charted to on private jets. This government is not for us. This system is not for us. It’s for them.

—Penny

I like the rain. There’s April rain today. The leaves glow green against the grey sky and dull bones of trees. It reminds me of Don Ray. He was always lively through his emaciated frame. He was lit up, like those dead trees and their bright leaves. One contradicts the other. In the last week of his eighty-odd year life he went to the movies, he visited his gal, he drove. Will he be like that too? One day we’ll all age, and the romantics will visit each other without airs, and hold each other’s aged hands, and think that life, even at its end, is a beautiful thing. My grandfather used to call my grandmother gal. I think he did. I can’t start questioning my memories now, they’re all we can have. We can never prove them. Our perceptions are so perverted by the internet and cameras and the constant photo-recording of our lives. What happened to perception? False-perceptions, true-perceptions, disagreements with no answers. We still have them. We have to hold them close, as close as ghosts and wisps of air can be held. Lose certainty in memory and you lose everything.

You’re my gal. “You hot sketch, you hot sketch,” said through tears. Heard through tears, held back, choked back, let fall. That’s what I remember from their funeral. My dad said it, that was how he ended his speech. He looked to their coffins and pointed, and told his mother, for the last time, her best compliment. Who was he telling? She was that. She was, that. That was her. I needed that extra sentence, desperately needed to add that distance from the memory. Otherwise I’m not here, I’m there. I enter it, still, after all these years. So much growth and change and time, and in a split second I’m gone. My body sits in the café, and my mind sits to the right hand side of the front pew of a dark wood paneled room. I sit next to my sister, and watch my dad give the eulogy for both of his parents, who died on the same day. I can’t believe she went second. Bubby, that’s what we called her. Zaidy died first. How could he leave her like that? Were they in the same room? How could she leave me? I cried more for her. She was beloved. I loved her, she loved me. The woman down their street, I remember her too. I forget her name but remember the house perfectly. Her living room, her front porch, the picture of her granddaughter who played hockey for the US Olympic team (her picture was at angle behind the couch in front of the window, its lace curtains half drawn). Her friends down the street too, who painted all of our portraits and gave us cookies in little Ziploc bags when we came to visit. Today the leaves glow fluorescent green against brown-gray bones and bark. Raindrops fall, thousands of them, millions of them.

Life is memory. Disjointed, distrusted, and hopelessly cherished, memories. They have to mean something.  Are these my memories? My life? Did Don Ray love the woman he saw, love the man he was, in those, his last days? Did he love the rain?

I felt distant musings on a rainy day, from a cold café.

Greetings, from Penny Lane.

Tin soldiers and Nixon comin’, we’re finally on our own.

What the hell happened to the spirit of The Revolution? I wasn’t there, but like many of the lost children of Y2K I feel cheated by having missed the last chance to be part of something bigger than myself. There was a brief moment, right around the eclipse of LSD that a whole generation thought things were going to get better once the world was in their hands. Militarism would become a value of the past, we would act together for the greater good. The kind of people who wanted to send Ali to kill Gooks would be ousted from the institutions, replaced by sensible folk who had kindness in their hearts. The Cold War lumbered on and fears of nuclear annihilation pervaded the souls of good people everywhere, then Neil Young released Helpless and it was over.

So what gives? They had the right idea, didn’t they? I thought that’s how idea’s were supposed to work, the right ones gradually become more powerful than the wrong ones and eventually they come to fruition. It seems like we’re back in 1957, everybody has receded behind their new white picket fences and are content to just keep on carrying on. Now we fight contract wars with no draft, effectively severing the last real tie between young people and the governments that pose to represent them. Without the reality of The Man being able to send me off to war, I’ve got no reason to care what The Man is up to anymore. That’s the problem. Democratic government is supposed to reflect the society that it presides over, our values it’s values. Today the gap between society and government is as wide and deep as the ocean. Apathy resounds. Accountability is at it’s lowest. And what do powerful people do when nobody is holding them accountable? Whatever the fuck they want, plus implementing all sorts of subtle changes that shore up that power and make it harder to take back later if we ever decide we want to. I won’t claim that the corporations run the west yet, but it won’t be long before they do if we don’t take back the power of state and use it to reign them in. Nobody feels like it’s their job to do so - know why? Because it’s to the advantage of powerful people for nobody to think it’s up to them to put a check on them. 

Sometimes it’s not about how it is, it’s about how they can make it look.

Guess we’re all just waiting for the facade to crumble, and for the corruption to be in your backyard rather than so far away. Maybe then we’ll have the will to take it back. One can only hope.

Dr. Gonzo

There is no such thing as eternal happiness. Eternal happiness exists as a fleeting feeling. There is no constant state of optimism. Some things are real,your voice like chimes, squirrels and birds and hunters and those hunted, and Arabian drums and pizza and rope and screams and the smiles of children and virgins and even soldiers far from home and the swimming moonlight.

Words are fascinating. They aren’t concrete, not really. Take the word pig. You pig fucking scum who hath raped the earth and plundered the population for their petty cash while the world watched and politely asked for someone to pass the popcorn. Different connotation than, for instance, round and pink as a happy pig. These words are worlds you create, like the world you create when you focus your eyes on one thing and not another, and as a result miss the quake of reality, or else catch beauty just in time. You invent reality. You hold your holy medallion of belief so tightly it slips through your fingers and is buried at the bottom of the sea like so many sunk ships, yet you notice not (your nerves were already numbed by blood loss and nerve damage). Unaware of the coin’s absence you boldly follow your legs down path after path, and if you never stumble you never notice how conceptions of truth fled with childhood. You hold to such nonexistent sentiments as right and wrong and government agency hegemony.

Then there are those who do miss a step, and flying through the air are astonished that the rushing pavement does not yield to their faulty calculations of physics and calculus. Splayed on the sidewalk they feebly stretch their fingers for the first time in years, and find them empty. Aware of their amulet’s abandonment their body contracts, and the mind screams “WHO THEN HAS BEEN RUNNING THE SHIP?? It’s a miracle we’ve avoided all the icebergs, Captain!…Captain?” They turn to find the world changed before their eyes. Their retinas have shifted. Re-focused, they scour the world for those awake. Among the so-called living they find little life, at first.

It is not until the final revenge of mother earth for the sins of the living dead that the other fallen climb out from their safe branches of retreat in the trees. Having witnessed the destruction of the world again and again, they welcome this new fallen wanderer to their self-made retreat. The world of artists is born, and all the while the television murmurs softly to sleeping ears, “life is going on just as normally as ever”.

Penny

We fuel hate with hate, that’s how the world works. I’m not the first to think this, I know that. I should have expected it, yet somehow it still takes me by surprise. I would like to become hardened, but it still hurts me. I want to not care when I hear groups hating each other and refusing to listen, too strong in their beliefs to even hear what you have to say. How do people live in this world? Seriously? What are we supposed to do to get through it? Just muddle through, they say. But what the fuck does that mean? Still get upset over the same shit that upset people last century, and the century before that and before that going back to cavemen? And who knows, maybe dinosaurs had bigots too. We have always had these people. I guess the world still turns. So what does it all mean then? What can it mean when we’re just ants, zombies, waiting for a catastrophe to wake us up and deplete our numbers and make us important again?

We don’t mean anything. Not individually. Our only chance in hell (and its more like chance in the universe) is that we matter collectively. But collectively, in large groups, we’re the worst of all! Policy is a joke. The government doesn’t care about its people, not as a whole it doesn’t. Individuals in it may. The system, however, is not for us. It is built, kept by, and to the benefit of The Them. The Self Interested Damned.  If only they were damned. Then there would be a second chance. But, there’s not.

There’s only our lives; which means there’s only now. Maybe, that’s the answer. There’s nothing. We don’t mean anything, not individually or as a group. We in-fight, and we hate, we spread intolerance and disease and rape and kill and rape the world all over again. So…there’s just this moment. Ourselves. It’s too fucked up to look at the big picture. You have to give yourself a greater goal, but know it might not matter, it might never get there. The goal is just to keep you going through the Now. And the next Now. Hopefully, you string it together so all of your Nows look alright, maybe it tells a story you like, you can live with your present Now because of the steps your past Now took. And your future Now will hopefully exist, and not hate the excruciating minutes of time that tick, loudly, incessantly on. Shatter the clock on the wall. Tell the ticking time to shut the fuck up. Fuck bearable. Make all your Nows interesting. It might be all there fucking is.

Good luck,

Penny Lane

Ever think to yourself “wow, I seem to be on the verge of an emotional breakdown!” Ever wonder how to speed up the process so you can move on with your life? Well look no further! Together with one of my esteemed zemeelat (classmate in Arabic if you were wondering), I have devised a few simple steps to hasten that pesky “wavering” process.

1. Delete your facebook. Click the “I’ll be back” button, you know its true.
2. Dye hair bright pink, based on life-long (ok, week-long) dream to do so.
3.  Seriously consider large upper back tattoo. Question potential parental-disownment.
4. Make lists outlining menial yet borderline psychotic tasks instead of starting research paper. That’s why they made library desks.
5.  Start seeing drugs as “fun enhancers”. Performing a boring task? Try it on drugs! Stop when notice inevitable week-long-headache recovery time.

That should do it, if none of the above leave you curled up in the corner of a public building muttering about tax returns, you probably weren’t on the verge of one anyway. Good luck, and god speed.

xxPenny Lane