Saturday, June 8, 2013

the shady side of life


JOHN LENNON: Is it better to shoot or be shot?

KURT COBAIN: Better? There’s no difference. If you’re the target, either way, that’s it.

JOHN LENNON: Shake your head. Look the other way. Yep. I see something in hindsight I’ve missed in attempting to be a tad more promethean in my thinking.

KURT COBAIN: Is it able to shake? I mean, anymore, now? Then? Whatever this substance of space is that we’re now dealing with.

JOHN LENNON: Nothing me and my monkey can’t eke out a dying from.

KURT COBAIN: Some guy who’s missed the back belt loop, pants sagging in all the wrong places, elbows on the table. He’s on edge but never over it. Strum away what you will, we’re still figuring to not ever figure in the midst of things again.

JOHN LENNON: Taken out before the seventh-inning stretch. Benched before the bells ring out for x-mas day. A hot dog left bun-less and plain. No more apples in the pie.

KURT COBAIN: That’s an American way to behave, you know?

JOHN LENNON: I could scream, “Yoko! Yoko!”

KURT COBAIN: Please. Don’t.

JOHN LENNON: It’s lobster week in New York City. Everything is red and green when you’re old and shitty. Not too scabby. A real effort for the hawk lovers to stroll over to Times Square and eat fried cockroaches. There’s never enough breakfast to go around, but who needs it, right?

KURT COBAIN: Not people like us. The pope, maybe. Or Harry Nilsson. But not folk like us.

JOHN LENNON: Ringo and his damn coke binges. Shit. Maybe he did us all in after all, in a manner, or without them.

KURT COBAIN: Manners?

JOHN LENNON: Yep. He was a slob who behaved neatly. The only case of that I’ve ever come across in the universe. There was only so much we both were made for, I think-- you and I. The two of us, when we were; not now, when we aren’t. 

KURT COBAIN:  And yet the damn Stones go on and on, rolling into tediously boring septuagenarian rock. How do they stand themselves?

JOHN LENNON: They don’t have to. They just go through the motions and let come what may. It’s such a passionless way to live, really. I pity old Mick and the crew. Dead while they still live.

KURT COBAIN: Better to burn out than…

JOHN LENNON: Fuck that. That’s not what I’m saying. Seriously, fuck that. You just burn like a fucking roman candle at both ends for so long, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other ways of behaving that’ll get your proverbial goat out to better pastures and other avenues of…well, of being you.

KURT COBAIN: Darn. Shoot. I didn’t take the easy way out. I really didn’t. Dagnabbit. It probably got so that I couldn’t stand my own presence, or could with present company excluded, i.e. me.

JOHN LENNON: Present company excluded, of course. That makes it and breaks it.

KURT COBAIN: Let’s pretend that we both are still around.

JOHN LENNON: Make up our lives from scratch? Sure.

KURT COBAIN: Anyway. What’s real? I scrape the grunge from the surface and get only gunkified nails in return. The world neglects the real stuff of being me and glories in my image.

JOHN LENNON: What is the difference between the life that we watch and the life that we lead? It might be subtler than one would think, the lack of one or the surplus of another. We scream timber but nobody’s around. Leap first; check the ground for signs of death. It doesn’t help. Addiction to a way of living, the need to be sucked in, to be dependent on being a viewer, for flattery at all times. A curse of bemused indifference to a fictional reality, losing the ability to discern what’s really real or just fake real.

KURT COBAIN: My dreams are stoked with popup ads and spam. My heart aches with dial-up slowness. There are no more lilies in the windows of my past. Get me to the asylum, right quick. I want to chew a wrench until I spit metal shards at all comers. I am not well at all.
           
JOHN LENNON: To watch without observing, lint-clogged thoughts. Time in and out of life. We’ve got a low pitch angle in our arm, right smack dab between the Perseus and the Sagittarius, curling away slowly without sticking out much. It takes light 1,000 centuries to cross the combined might of a few hundred billion stars worth of distance. We are never without home in sight, like on a mushy but clear evening in the northern hemisphere, walking with the tide towards swirls of ways of milk.    
           
KURT COBAIN: Yeah. It’s like-- whose life are you going to save this time? Mine?
           
JOHN LENNON: I doubt it. Maybe Dylan’s. Maybe start a war. Get a hand grenade’s thoughts on the matter. Love or hate, you know? What’s it going to be?
           
KURT COBAIN: I was taught to hate from an early age. The most vile parts of the human psyche concoct these terrible things, the parts that go to war, that kill without remorse, that think better-them-than-me thoughts. A distinction that doesn’t need to be made: them, us. It’s a flimsy, selfish construct with horrible consequences for humanity.  
           
JOHN LENNON: The clock ticks and we all run for our phones.
           
KURT COBAIN: Songs of love and trouble, a sucker’s tilt towards an empty jackpot. The face you’re wearing doesn’t match the one we’ve got on file. Sorry for the inconvenience. It’s all your fault.
           
JOHN LENNON: True that. Listen, though. I’m wondering still about missing things. I mean, like…well, she left me for a toupee salesman. What else can I say? And then that damn bird kept attacking my head at the bus stop. It got so that I couldn’t leave the house without the constant worry of somebody plummeting to their death and landing right on top of me. I couldn’t stop looking up, walking under overhangs, zigzagging my way to the market, as if this would lessen the billion-in-one chances of being crushed in this manner: a man killed by another’s suicidal leap to the pavement. Brilliant, right? Eventually I guess I chose the Pascalian route and just stayed home. Avoiding the trouble and complications that come with leaving one’s room, or one’s bed.
           
KURT COBAIN: Whatever you believe in, whatever keeps the flag flying high through your weakest moods, it all strips the hull and retraces nobody’s path through your own personal scream-less wilderness. Something in or out of the way. Always.
           
JOHN LENNON: Just hanging out on the observation deck, making hay, passing the passersby, letting out a spool of myself into the too-large life of it all. Watching what could be happening, but isn’t. A somewhere man seeing what isn’t believing. Believing what’s never seen.
           
KURT COBAIN: That’s it. I’m all rocked out. Let’s tear down the chandeliers and throw the diamonds from the highest window we can find. There won’t be a me left to care.
           
JOHN LENNON: I’m writing this for someone who’ll never know it is for them.
           
KURT COBAIN: So, I guess we both end up the same. It’s no matter. It’s all that matters. It is what it is, now.

JOHN LENNON: Funny how that happens all the time.

KURT COBAIN: Well. That’s it. I’m done.

JOHN LENNON: Me too. Me too. Me, motherfucking, too.