Goldie-looking chains

What do you do when someone who was gold for you becomes silver? Do you wait for them to slide down to bronze or just let them go? Do you hope that if you polish them enough, try hard and work at it, they will become gold once more? Maybe you start to think that they only looked like they were gold, that they were covered in gold leaf, which flaked away under pressure, leaving the plainer metal that lay beneath.

But surely silver is good enough. You tell yourself that but when you have had gold, silver seems to have little lustre. If you had never felt the gold...

But you did.

I cannot convince myself that it is okay to be second best in her life. I cannot convince myself that it is okay to be just another way to pass the time. I cannot rescue myself from vanity.

I sometimes feel it is my only vice, and that all the other things that are wrong about me are outcomes of being vain.

***

So anyway, what does it matter? I'm not getting out of here alive. I am going to rot in suburban Brisbane. I am going to spend my days editing dull bullshit about finance and I will die in pieces, what is left still to die.

I can hardly even get up the energy to whine about it and I have nothing else to blog about. I hardly ever bother with the news. I realised some time ago that none of it matters to me. Unless an airliner hits this street, the outside world can barely affect me. I am sealed from it all. The only time it touches me is when I drive around in the Smegma; then the cudchewers of southern Brisbane get to take a shot at me with their insane driving. I have a flicker of recognition when I see in the Sunday Mail that hoons are on the rampage, but when I read the faked outrage of the Mail's hacks, my sympathies begin to shift to the hoons, who at least are having fun. I read the Guardian Weekly, but more and more it seems to be packed with bourgeois whining about the world and how unsightly it is. I just don't believe that any of the people who are doing the whining are willing to take the necessary steps to make this a decent world. I know I'm not.

I wonder whether that is at the heart of it: I just can't be bothered. Can I find the source of that in vanity? Sure I can. I can't be bothered because I think I'm too good for the whole thing.

But what the fuck made me think that I had anything to be vain about in the first place? If I could answer that, I would not be mouldering away in Mansfield, wishing for a plane to hit the street, so I can just expire and consider the whole thing a bad deal.

***

What the fuck did I think I had that was so special? I thought I was gold, and that you should know when you see gold that it's worth preserving. You'd think I would have learned that I too am silver only on my best days, iron on the rest, but I never have. Maybe I confused wanting to be for being; but maybe, just maybe, I really do have it in my heart, deep inside, and if you open me up, there it is, the smallest nugget, pure and real, maybe, maybe, maybe.

posted by Dr Zen @ 6:57 pm