just like old times, but not really
weather: 🌤️ yuck
critters: sulfurs; painted lady; turkey vulture; two ravens
i don't know the name of what we were. a group? a club? a gang? just a fragment of a scene, too small to be a scene by ourselves. we weren't exactly friends. we traded shitty art and made fun of everything, fascinated by aberration in others and in ourselves. i watched showgirls and war footage with them.
this was years ago, so everything we made is gone now. the art, the prose, the song parodies. most counterculture goes unrecorded and the rest winds up in landfills. i don't look around online for evidence it once existed. i wouldn't google it even if i remembered names.
the scene attracted a certain kind of guy. most of us weren't this kind of guy, but they show up in every counterculture. they were immune to the human experience--nothing meant anything; everything was a joke.
one was like that for no obvious reason. i thought his politics were a joke like everything else, but he never laughed. another was (probably) like that because his dad had yacht/burning man/lake house money. and another was (probably) like that because he'd gone to iraq. or afghanistan. i don't remember.
there were others. different circumstances, same pathology. a mysterious common denominator.
my infatuation with one of these guys didn't go anywhere. he was antisocial, in the most cold and traditional sense, but he painted like a renaissance master to my seventeen-year-old eyes. he made me some paintings to illustrate my gruesome horror juvenilia. i kept them after i left, then lost the stories and the paintings in a move.
that's for the best. i'm doing that thing i do with all the strange men of my youth: ransacking them in my mind, looking for a hint of affection. he didn't know what i felt towards him because he'd have called me a disgusting faggot. many of us were faggots, disgusting and otherwise, but there are ways to say that and there are ways to say that, know what i mean?
so the other day i ran into the kind of people with the common denominator. i listened to them talk exactly how they (we) all used to talk. our obscurely edgy slang sounded stupid and empty, decades out of date, signaling irrelevant anti-virtues.
i thought about what i'd say to them--since i have no way of finding the old 'them,' i'd have to speak to these versions of 'them.' Y's and Z's making shitty art out of carpet-bombing spite, absorbed into the necromantized version of the scene. brainworms ate their knowledge of how it all started and why. what words could i possibly use?
i could say, gee, the scene makes so much fucking money now. and they would agree, like duh, of course it makes money, there's money in demolitions. it's my loss for getting out too early.
i could tell them that what comes next will be their fault. they'd laugh because they think what comes next will only be bad for you and me. they don't know they won't be let into the bunkers.
i could tell them they won't, but they've never experienced consequences before. why would they fear them now?
they were the first people i could sort of be myself around. not all the way, but closer than i'd ever come before. so i still miss em.
i don't think i changed, though. my disgust for what they are now isn't evidence i matured or learned some kind of lesson. i just retained a basic capacity for the human experience of shame. if you can't feel shame, you will stay in that scene. forever.
and why not stay? why not slaughter art and tenderness and hope and trust, and why not make bank doing it? nothing means anything; everything is a joke.