I haven’t been writing enough. Which is not to say that I haven’t been writing at all, only that the desert has given me nothing but the time and opportunity to work on my craft and I haven’t been taking as much advantage of that as I should be.

For this I can only plead the Jackson Fifth and blame it on sunshine and the moonlight, good times and definitely the boogie.

I had an idea early this morning, before my first waking thought of Not another goddamn day, something dragged into the screaming world from my hypothalamus, skinless and half-remembered and, like all ideas culled from dreams, utterly stupid: I would list every single day of my life (so far) I’ve spent not being dead.

Stupid, yes, but also mildly interesting and backed by enough minimalist pretension and satirical smugness to pass as ‘experimental’ writing. Plus it’s kind of cool. So of course Google tells me it’s already been done.

And that’s fine (again: stupid idea to begin with), but still a little stinging. We do so hate to be reminded of how common we are, after all.

If I had gone through with it, I would have written the days of the week, starting with Friday, a total of 10,120 times. On January 10th of this year I turned 10,000 days old, which is an impressive and grandiloquent way of saying I’m a few months past 27. When you’re chronically depressed, self-loathing, intermittently suicidal, and prone to romanticizing the fast lives and early exits of rock stars and giants (and are reminded every once in a while by Google of just how unimaginative and unoriginal you are), 27 is a good age to try to get through as quickly as possible.

When you’ve been depressed for a very long time — and I suppose I’m not the first to make this connection — your depression eventually turns to boredom in that things don’t really get any better or worse, they just are. In a different life or world existence would be justified merely by itself; in this life, this world, there are very few things more indefensible than being bored. Especially at East Jesus.

Haven’t seen too many [dreamers] around lately. Things have been tough … They say dreaming is dead, no one does it anymore. It’s not dead — it’s just that it’s been forgotten, removed from our language. Nobody teaches it so nobody knows it exists. And the dreamer is banished to obscurity. Well, I’m trying to change all that, and I hope you are too. By dreaming, every day. Dreaming with our hands and dreaming with our minds. Our planet is facing the greatest problems it’s ever faced, ever. So whatever you do, don’t be bored. This is absolutely the most exciting time we could have possibly hoped to be alive. And things are just starting.

— Waking Life (2001)

As aphorisms go, it’s hard to find one so simultaneously beautiful and naive as “Whatever you do, don’t be bored.” Knowing that, it’s even harder to forgive myself when I find myself these days unable to muster the appropriate excitement at the sight of a towering garbage fire, or bikini-clad girls firing off shotgun shells, or the great country-wide margins and franchises of the Great Marginalized and Disenfranchised occupying the streets and shutting down entire cities.

Of course, one could assert that I’m hardly alone in this, that this is all just a symptom of the millennial malaise desensitizing us to any spectacle that isn’t limited to a twenty-bucks-a-pop movie screening or the ejaculatory fear-mongering of tumescent and overpaid talking heads on television; that the whoring of scientific discovery and the incessant background presence of white noise, black vans, and cell phone radiation have long since poisoned whatever wonder and awe we had for the 21st century.

If that’s true, and we are all well- and truly fucked, then I can only feel pity for the fifteen foreign exchange Political Science students up for the weekend from San Diego, partly because they’re a nice bunch of kids preparing for a world that quite frankly has no use for them, and mostly because their amazement at seeing East Jesus for the first time reminded me very much of my own, a not-so-long time ago.

I hope that’s not true. I hope I’m the only one who constantly feels this way. I hope that it’ll eventually change. And completely and sincerely, totally and without agenda, I hope those foreign kids are only studying political science in America to learn what not to do.