Mission ends in a few days. The track seems clear ahead of me. I don’t want you to think too often that I’m grasping for words. I’d rather you forget who the fuck I am than ever think I don’t know what I’m doing. I listened to Jeff Magnum sing all day yesterday. He didn’t seem such a recluse in the one recording where he explains about the song “Little Birds.” ∞ You kept asking me to be these things that I will never be. Here I am, responsible, five digits in the bank. A little older and I don’t feel any different. I still haven’t worked you out of my system. There was a novel somewhere in that attic. I want to be a singer like Elliot Smith. Like all his best songs on the Good Will Hunting soundtrack, in the 90s, when he was still awesome. ∞ The way through the bloodshed of everyday life doesn’t seem so complicated anymore. Once you realize you’re not a big shot and might never be, things get simpler. At the end of this coming decade I’ll take a fresh breath and write your chapter once and for all. I think this is how the geniuses felt when the 60s were over. Everybody just put their heads down and hoped for the best and it never came and the suicide rates climbed up and before you knew it was the Reagan Youth and the eighties rebellion against the rebirth of a monstrosity they’d once sought to destroy with bright colors and free love. There came AIDS and the government never uttered the phrase. I still can’t see how you can go happily to your grave with that much blood on your hands. There are little murders and then there is genocide. You killed a generation, Mr. Reagan, are you to die a proud man? (I’d have asked him on his deathbed.) ∞ The world held on until the 1990s and here come back our bright colors except now they’re all on parachute pants and the Olsen Twins and that one little supermodel murdered and Kurt Cobain. ∞ Now all we’ve got are fucking remixes and you have to wonder if anyone’s looking forward anymore. It’s not easy to be a product of your times if your times are in bad decline. We should all of us hole up in musty libraries burning bridges and throwing parties. ∞ One day they’ll burn, burn, burn, like the histories they stole from us. ∞ Ah, but he is so angry. ∞ In my dream you are forever walking out of the shower with a towel spaghetti wrapping your head and the blue one wrapped around your slight body and smiling wide-eyed as I surprise you with the news that it’s perfectly legal in this state, they’ll never catch us now, we should leave today. And then the retro look with the jean skirt as you kissed me goodbye that morning in the bathroom so your sister couldn’t see. You probably didn’t think I’d live to see 2008. I never did. ∞ We aren’t awake anymore. We’re all resting for the revolution that’s not guaranteed to come. Keep waiting on others to change the world. I’ll shore up my accounts.
