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.
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