"There was nothing special about the room, but they say even a prisoner in the Bastille would wax sentimental over leaving his cell after languishing in it many years."
-John L. Parker, Jr., Once a Runner, Page 142
"I'll lay awake for a while
I'll leave the light on a while
You couldn't last a lifetime..."
Coheed and Cambria, The Light and the Glass
It's been a year since Spaceship Earth died, or sort of died, I'm not quite sure what exactly happened to it but its mind lives on with the rest of it is not. Whatever Spaceship Earth was I'm not sure. I understood what it did but can make no assertions about how it did what it did and now it's dead.
This is not exactly normal. No one is supposed to think their car was sentient and definitely isn't supposed to be mourning its passing a year after it became scrap metal. Maybe this is normal for a dog or something, but not a car. I do know that it was alive though, and I know that stranger things have happened (both before and after noon).
Sometimes when I'm lying awake I think "hey, it's not supposed to be this way." I wasn't supposed to break my foot and get depressed and become totally uncool and I would be kicking ass in some major conference and getting free shoes by the truckload instead of underachieving athletically at a mid-major school but setting world-leading marks for lameness. (It's true. This year, I ran world leading times for the 5000 meter go to bed at a reasonable hour, 3000 meter diet high in fiber and whole grains, and the 1500 meter sit in your room on a Friday night watching Season 1 of the X-Files.)
To everyone in my building this year: I'm sorry I was kind of an ass-hat. I'm sorry I dropped the f-bomb on you guys so many times about the lounge not being clean, I'm sorry I messed with the cable, and I'm sorry I took Becca's cookie that one time. I may have also taken somebody's yogurt, but since it was unlabeled I can't be sure where to direct my apology. I wish I wasn't so cagey and antisocial. You're not bad people. I just don't get 4chan as much as you do I guess.
I used to be intelligent and semi-useful, but you can bet I did away with that pretty quick, when I decided to go to school for creative writing and have this stupid pipe dream of running really fast. I could be building bridges or discovering forms of alternative energy, or at least figuring out how to make sure America doesn't become as useless as I'm going to become. Come 2039, I'll be spending my 49th birthday in a Chinese-owned, American sweatshop, treating baby toys with asbestos in order to feed my family, which won't exist for one of two reasons. This could either be because they have been shot for not supporting our Dear Leader, or because in the next few years I'll be too useless to maintain not smelling like week-old elephant carcass and my inability to interact with humans will exponentially increase. This is entirely because I have chosen to pursue a completely useless career path. Every kid in China is going to grow up to be a kick-ass engineer while we're all trying to find ourselves while writing whiny songs about our heart-wrenching breakups in our v-necks or soaking up beers in the back of a pickup truck to get ready to watch hour after hour after hour of cars decked out in corporate logos do infinity laps around a racetrack. I probably should have been learning to program computers instead of reading (and re-reading, and re-re-reading) The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I'm sorry America.
Also in 2039, I will attend my 30 year high school reunion and everybody will have jobs on asteroids or the moon or some kind of artificial satellite because they decided to do something with their lives. There will be a fifteen foot bubble around me because I will be very smelly. Lord knows how I will get there. Maybe I'll just roll into a ball. A lot of times I just roll into a ball. Maybe I'm trying to hide from the world, maybe I'm trying to get somewhere without walking, I don't really know.
At least when Spaceship Earth was around I could actually write semi-goodly, and now all you get the crap up here or some things of similar consistency. Right now, my writing lacks a certain quality that I like to call quality. It's kind of like you stuck a Twilight novel in the blender, added a solution of equal parts clamato juice and whale bile, splattered said concoction all over the walls, then demolished said wall with a bulldozer and had homeless men defecate all over it for a good year, threw bird entrails over it, and had USA Today do a feature story on this pile of disgustingness. That is how I would describe my writing.
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