Nothing special

Every day I go out and do something. I work, I do standup, I get something to eat. I leave my apartment and I do something. What they don’t tell you about the real world is that this is a struggle. It’s easy when your parents are constantly pushing you to do stuff and signing you up for shit that you don’t want to do.

You don’t even think about it, you’re constantly just being pushed along down a path until eventually you feel the pushing stop and you have to decide for yourself what to do and where to go. And it’s very, very easy to do nothing at all. For to do nothing is the preferred state of all human beings. And nothing has become so easy to accept. We can eat whatever we like, standing won’t be required for more than 4 hours a day, if at all. 

Some people get paid to do nothing. They live in their suburban homes where nothing is promised to happen, they commute through organized roads at a time when car and traffic safety are at all-time highs, and they go and sit down to click on random computer files until 5 PM. They sit there, clicking weaving through the same parts of the internet and their precious emails, fearing that somehow their lives will be affected by the 250,000 dead Syrians.

These days, you can even do something while you’re doing nothing. It used to be that if you were doing nothing, you had to really be doing nothing. Then somebody invented the cigarette, and the world changed. Suddenly it wasn’t enough to just do nothing. Something had to be included with nothing. Now we have smartphones, which are nothing disguised as everything. I have never seen a person on their smartphone who didn’t look like an idiot. They could be looking at galaxies or complex scientific equations and they still look like fools. 

Ideally, this wouldn’t be what I choose to write. I would be writing about some incredible, imaginative world filled with wonder and amazement. But I just can’t do that. For one thing, my imagination feels like it’s been abducted. When I try to think creatively these days, my brain just gets flooded with images of the modern world such as Donald Trump, DJ Khaled, Kobe Bryant, Syria, abortion, gun violence and Facebook. So in this moment, I have no imagination. I’m not sure if it was stolen from me or if I had never had it to begin with. 

Secondly, and perhaps this is the causation of the my initial problem, but I feel like the world doesn’t deserve any fiction right now. Fiction is a distraction, apropos of nothing. It seems as meaningless to me now as it ever has, but what could ever take its place in literary art? Autobiographical tales seem worthless now that our lives are being downloaded onto the internet. 

I dreamt of my Grandmother last night. We sat and talked at her kitchen table while she smoked cigarettes. At some point in the dream I realized that I was talking to her, and I broke down and cried. She got up and left the table, and then I woke up. No tears in the real world. Clearly the dream was fake, but it wasn’t really fiction.Not the fiction I’m thinking of, at least. While perhaps a bit mystic, the dream was too realistic to turn into a story. In my mind, realistic fiction is as good as lies.

But to describe spaceships or rainbow worlds or alternate realities seems like a disservice to anyone reading this. Maybe that’s what I tell myself because I can’t come up with anything interesting that lasts more than 200 words.

So to combat this, I go out and I do stuff. But no matter what I do, no matter how interesting my experience is and no matter what new thoughts enter my brain, I still come back to my filthy apartment and plop down in front of my computer to browse reddit and Facebook. I smoke too many cigarettes and joints until I can’t feel a thing, then I stare out into the Brooklyn night sky waiting to think of something that will change the world.