"We are all succumbing to entropy."
At least, that's what someone in a pub told me. The pub is incidental, by the way. The person isn't, in case they feel forgotten. Hello Daniel, thanks for the nightmares.
I was in another pub the other week, because if there is one place you are guaranteed to find a bitter, cynical young man, it is taking out his faux misery on alcohol. Mainly because I enjoy being drunk, but also because we all know tormented alcoholics are cool really and get the best sex and so forth. I was drinking with a workmate, because I don't have any real friends.* We were moaning about relationships, since she is in one that she doesn't like and I have an egalitarian approach to hating everyone who could broadly pass for human. I don't even know why anymore, but that's not the point.
"You're alright, Steve," she said, "You're still young. You can't be more than what, thirty-one, thirty-two?"
I'm twenty-six, and if anyone has ever been in that situation, you will know the absolute spine-tingling chill that shoots down your back like a runaway train. I had, somehow, transformed from being the fresh-faced young man who always got called out for ID in bars, who dragged everyone down because we'd have to try somewhere else. I was that guy. Now I was thirty-two. And I was just coming to terms with the whole not-a-teenager-anymore syndrome. And still dragging people down.
 |
| That's it. It's all over. I might as well be DEAD. |
When I got home, I flicked through my phone to write a shopping list** and found another list I'd made. It was 77 days old, according to the phone. The new phone, which I got recently. Which I got 150 days ago. Eleven weeks of my life, just like that. Half of the to-do list was still not done, and I was categorically 77 days more dead than I was when I first wrote it. Despairing, I turned on the X-box, loaded a game, and stared mutely at the screen which told me I was 123 hours through my fifth playthrough.
I've always thought You Only Live Once, was more a stark reminder of the frailty of human life than an excuse to go planking on a train track. After all, most of the time you hear people saying 'YOLO', like a cool hipster fuckwit, it's usually before they try and shoot a firework out of their arse, skateboard of the 34th story of an office building, or generally do something stupid, as if doing stupid things starves of the inevitability of death and guarantees invincibility. Thankfully, it doesn't.
So now I'm sat at work, cheerfully reading the "FIVE REGRETS OF THE DYING" on Facebook, because there is nothing really better to do and you can only eat so much popcorn while waiting for a fire to break out. Should one occur, I will leap into action. Until that point, I'll sit here killing time. None of them actually apply to me at all, which is great.
1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
I wish I'd had the motivation to live the life some people expected of me, instead of wasting my time.
2. I wish I hadn't worked so hard.
Speaking as a manager, I can categorically say that I have never worked hard in my entire life. I graduated from school two years late, got an extension on my final year at University, and have managed to work myself into a position based entirely on responsibility and not at all on actually visibly doing anything.
3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.
If I had, at any point, expressed my feelings, I would almost certainly be in prison for murder. That is just how it goes. It's for the best.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
See footnote.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.
I am fucking ecstatic most of the time, in defiance of what people think. Presumably people assume I spend my spare time folded into a box or crying in a bathtub whilst summoning the courage to kill myself. Or something. I don't let my inner mania show as much as I could, true, because that last time I tried the whole 'positive outlook on the world' thing, I got slapped hard across the face in under an hour by someone who screamed "WHO ARE YOU?". I never went in for positivity after that, since people obviously aren't used to it. Thank you Jez.
In conclusion, there is nothing really to be gleaned from this post at all. Sure, I've recently been painfully reminded that I'm older than I was, but the same can be said for when I first started writing this about half an hour ago. I expect you wanted some sort of wrap-up. Maybe some poor philosophy or something funny. Next you'll want the world. The only thing I've really picked up on is dear God, I need to get out more.
Also, TV tropes is a huge cancer on the bowels of productivity.
* Friends are what happen to other people. Instead, I have a cadre of committed drinkers, more than willing to sit in truculent silence and drink with the steady, relentless determination of the damned.
** Because I'm a fucking adult, apparently.
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