dothedevo

this is an essay on something I'd been thinking about for a while and it intrerested me, so I wrote about it. nothing too coherent. side note - wrote this while listening to hole and beethoven. if you can hear the musical influences in the writing, you're on crack.

Some would argue that humanity, as a whole, has devolved since culture became so profoundly accessable. The masses are informed, included, and more than ever, we are a fundamental part of society. There is nothing without us. We are the white noise in the crowd, the thousands of tiny voices screaming for attention, demanding to be heard. We are the consumers with the pockets shoved full of money, buying up what the innovators have deemed right for us to buy. We are the mindless, the meaningless, but we are so completely vital, it is nearly impossible to imagine life without us.

We wouldn’t be here without the nagging lure of popular culture. The need to fit in is something rooted so deeply within human nature, it is an undeniable part of any trend, any shift, any change in society. And now society is plugged in, wires snaking around those painfully vulnerable bundles of nerves we call our brains, and we are listening with a heartfelt intensity that is uncontested in nature. We learn of every way we are so starkly different from our peers, every imperfection that we must seek to repair, every way we have destroyed both ourselves and our world, and we are prompted to change, prompted to make repairs on our very nature. We are diagnosed, but are we sick?

Maybe so. We let our psyches be smashed and mutilated. We are dominated by the sheer force of culture.It exposes and exploits us, leaves us aching for more. We are addicts, we long desperately to understand this world that is so clearly defined for us in the lines of catchy pop songs that leave a bitter taste on the tongue and manufactured faces glowering under fake lighting.  Culture has murdered before, it will murder again. It cannot be convicted. Everyone turns, so passively, to blame the industry for a girl who wasted away until she was nothing at all, to blame the industry for a shattered boy who died alone and unwanted because he poisoned himself. They do nothing. They can do nothing. Popular culture is the detriment of a thousand lives, the wreckage of a million desires. It taunts and then cripples.

It begs for the question: why is it here? As humans, we destroy anything that provokes the ego, anything that challenges the way we see ourselves. Self esteem is our most valuable resource. It is something we cannot do without. So why, then, do we risk losing it for the sake of this network of airbrushed bodies and jagged guitar riffs and fabricated conflicts resolved within twenty seven minutes time?  Biologically, it is senseless. Humanity conquers all scientific reason when they endorse culture, condone it, demand it.

It could suggest a victory over supposed evolution. A triumph over the circle that we are locked into by the synapses that fire up and down our spines with such recklessness. It is a feat with implications greater even than that of the previously addressed ego, a definite end to the circle. It moves past the worship of ourselves, past the worship of God, to the worship of others. To the worship of other humans, humans who drown themselves in deliberate filth. Humans who represent the ideals of what can only be explained as a society gone terribly wrong, distorted and broken by itself. What are they to us anyway? We want to be them, yet we mock them, we tear them apart, we catalyze their destructions. So maybe it is not a victory. Maybe it’s a flaw.

Whatever it is, it is here, and it is here to stay. Culture is more than a regional trend. It locks us into an entirely new circle, one that we need as much as we need lingering animal instincts, as much as we need the very oxygen we part our lips so subconsciously to breathe. We are held by it, caught up in it. We cannot escape, and as far as we are concerned, there is never any need to. For as we are captivated, we are protected, and more than that, we are united. Popular culture creates a bond throughout humanity of an intensity and necessity mirrored by nearly nothing else.

We are held together by the fabric of songs with hooks that draw us in and hold us there, hold us in rock arenas where we scream our lungs out to be heard above a crowd that vastly outnumbers us. We are held together by the fabric of insipid dramas with shallow characters and predictable plots, of commercials that we watch with a vapid fascination we cannot deny. We are held together by the fabric of what is universally understood, universally accepted. Trends are nothing. Culture is what matters.

We will do anything, we will kill ourselves and, worse, cram ourselves into tiny states of mind we can barely breathe in, to be a part of it. Most of the time, we succeed without trying. We suffocate in normalicy, we forget the independent mind. We forget what it felt like to think outside of tabloid columns with showy print, cleverly scripted lines that sell at the box office. We find a soul crushing delirium, a beautiful wastefulness, a uniquely human joy at fitting in. We are the culture. We own it, and more than anything, that is what makes us united.

War comes and goes. Political figures are nothing more than a source of scandal, more people to watch through a figurative glass, more lives to come crashing down before the public eye. They are celebrities in their own way, breeding scandal and controversy. What they think means little to us, it is what they do and it is how we can abuse them that is relevant. The world is not sewn together by politics, nor by any ideals at all. It is depravity, decadence, that sews us together now. We are all one and the same in our culture. We are all one and the same in the way we are swallowed up and spit out by the monster that is society’s finest accomplishment. We are manipulated and lied to together, and that is real unity, real togetherness. It is comforting to learn that we are not alone in our devolution, and so we strive to make the most of the one facet of unity we have been able to find. We pride ourselves on knowing nothing. We pride ourselves on ignorance. Is there anything else that humanity has so universally come to adore and respect? There is no greater common uniter.

History manipulates itself to show favor to those who write it, but popular culture is an unchanging record of what occurs, a sample of the masses, a protest that speaks in terms of pure, unscathed stupidity. And, because of that, is more accessible than anything else in the world to the people. Four hundred years from now, the words to the songs we hear on the radio today, the shrill snatches of sound that artistic young men with dramatic tendancies like to call revolution, will be remembered. But will every loss of life, every disaster, every real change in humanity? The story we write for ourselves in popular culture is a petty one, but it is painfully accurate. Not accurate factually, but accurate in its own way. It represents what we have thought, what we want to convey, what we mean to say. It represents what the public has deemed good enough, and naturally, it is of little substance. Is that not the way humanity should choose to portray themselves?

We have lost ourselves in its abyss, strayed off the path into its waiting arms, and now it will never let us go. We are slaves to the human instinct that locks us here, captives of the careful engineering that taunts our instinct. We don’t have culture; it has us. Without it, our world is a lost one, a deprived one, a broken one. We will fall, as all societies do. We are not invincible. But this concept, this thing, will never fall. Popular culture is the binding force of all humanity, it is the very reason we can breathe today. It is, in the simplest terms, our accidental savior. Demon and redeemer in one, it forces us to live with each other, to unite with each other, to understand each other. When our world comes crashing to a halt, we will know it because the papers will report it, the newscasters will announce it.

 If our culture were to fail us, we would die alone. To be lied to is an easier fate than to be shut out of any understanding at all. We cannot go on pretending that popular culture is a contrived notion, is an inconsequential principle. It is our everything.

Humanity is little more than a race of useless machines, forgetting to do what we were made for. Culture is a  lifeship in in a vast sea of hopelessness, offering us reason to get up in the morning, reason to pretend we still care. It is the abolishment of apathy, the catalyst of the maddening love – for the human race, for the innovations it has so carefully crafted, for ourselves, even – that has come to serve us so well in these past years. That is why we hunger for it, and why we must have it. Popular culture is our most absolute need.

Will was pressed against the wall, hands shoved into his pockets and eyes lowered. “Hey, did you…?” He started, sighing hoarsely and not finishing.

It was the first time Stone had heard him lost for words. “What?” He asked, careful not to speak loudly and provoke his throat.

Will licked his lips nervously and dropped his voice low when he spoke. “Die.”

this doesn't have a title yet, and it's not anything long-term, or even long. just something somewhat morbid and melodramatic I wrote for fun. oh, yeah, and I wrote this mostly while listening to frente's harm, so I suppose you could say it was sort of inspired by that. by that and by kurt cobain, apparently.

Drenched the hollow light from the window, his skin looks blue. His brittle fingers clench the smoky paper of a dead cigarette, but they’re too stiff to hold on. It slips out of his hand, hits with the floor with a barely audible thud. He doesn’t move. Doesn’t take it. His hand shudders a little and then goes limp, fingers curling against each other, jagged nails sawing into each other. He sighs a little, exhaling a deep, labored breath.

His eyes flutter open and shut, lashes scraping against the pale skin under his eyelids. There are bags under those eyes, weighty wrinkles that won’t ever go away, regardless of how long he lets himself drown in the dark, shifting colors of sleep. He’s too young for that, but his body doesn’t care anymore. It’s wretched, wracked with exhaustion. His hair sticks to his face with dried, cold sweat and strangles him inside itself. It’s too long, too messy, he never even tries to wash it anymore. Lying on the bathroom floor beside the dirty white expanse of an unused tub, it seems ironic that he should fade in such a grimy state.

There’s something tragically beautiful about him. Something about the chilling terror on his face, carved into the lines of a thin, parched mouth, etched into the muscles that stay tensed even when the rest of him is weakened so much that he couldn’t tense if he wanted to. His anxiety is infinite, it dominates and defines him, even now, even when he’s released by chemical formulas and human physics; unarguable terms.

He will never get away. His tongue brushes against his teeth, against the cracks and canyons in his chapped lips and knaws at a swollen wound until it bleeds. The blood makes a tiny river on his face, onto his neck, where it pools out into nothing. He shudders a little, shifts and thrusts himself down onto his stomach. The sudden demands put on his body are too much. With a hushed whimper, he shivers rapidly, body tensing and breaths shallow now.

He’s bony everywhere. His spine protrudes out in a broken, overwrought way, his ribs threaten to burst out of the skin that holds him together. There’s something stifling about his skinniness, as though it makes him more fragile, more easy to destroy.

The funny thing is, he doesn’t need anyone to destroy him. There’s no predator, no murderer, no inflictor of pain. It’s him, alone on the floor, needles and bottles a hollow testimony to everything he’s tried and everything that’s failed him. He’s addicted to this, addicted to coming so close to death that his soul can catch a glimpse of the profound revelations that make life worth falling back to.

But he can’t crawl back to the shallow light that makes everything work again. He’s too far away, too close to the absolute darkness that he’s come to find is more like home than anything else to him now. It’s his. He’s sobbing now, but the tears won’t come because he’s too dehydrated, and then he’s coughing. A dry, raspy, lifeless noise that makes him sob even harder because it’s so dead, he’s so dead.

Is he even really moving anymore? He takes a short, desperate breath when he finds that he doesn’t have any air. The cavity in his throat is too small, too limiting. Is he alive? He feels for the clammy white skin but he can’t feel, his limbs are numb and without elasticity.

He slumps to the floor, raking back hair that’s already pushed away from his face with one hand, steadying himself. He’s a body, he’s a corpse, but somehow death is easier to deal with than life, right now.

His skin is transluscent now, a network of vains tied to a throbbing heart that’s on its last legs of strength. His eyes don’t flutter, his fingers don’t move. When he stops breathing, it seems like that’s what is meant to happen. He’s ready to go because there isn’t anything left to do here, nothing he is capable of doing. The weight of what is happening to him has settled, and he can’t stand under it. Can’t even think.

The murder of one’s self is very tiring.