LVP

This post is going to sound aggressive. It's been a rough...I hesitate to say "day," as the start and end time has been so scrambled. I haven't washed my hair or had a full meal in 20+ hours, my sleep schedule has been intermittently screwed, the coffee I had to finally wake me up at 3 p.m. tasted like cardboard, 66.6% of the company was less-than-desirable, my company was less-than-desirable to 66.6%, and, as usual, I'm having some annoyingly paradoxical internal conflict. Which is the primary causative agent of the shadow over this shitshow.

I'm not aesthetically made for the grungy sort of lifestyle. I get zits if I don't pay attention. My hair's on the thin side. I can't stand being stubbly for more than two days. I like to get up at a normal time, exercise regularly, eat right, and keep tabs on my hygiene. Right now I look like a damn hipster, all sans makeup with bedhead and wearing this ridiculous lumberjack flannel onesie shirtdress sinfully comfortable thing, and I smell like body oils and sleep. This kind of thing does work for me occasionally, I love it when it does - more often in the winter, nights of euphoria or passion or some other such adventure. But not now, or maybe just not here. Nothing ever feels alive here. Especially not me.

Anyway, before I go and wash this day off, I may as well share the couple loosely-formed insights I had. After hearing some of the lush music and boisterously-spoken French from a film in a setting I don't care to elaborate on, I've decided that European culture is, for lack of a better word, "cheesy" in such a self-assured, decadent way that we don't dare touch it - to us it's loud, it's lewd, it's oversaturated, and it doesn't give a damn. Because America is just lacking in that sort of culture, it seems extravagant, but it isn't, it's just the way of the world, and in some respects I think we are way too inhibited. We are the only ones without primal dancing and drums and exotic instruments, classic dress in blasts of primary color, with sociological and societal restraints on greeting casual friends with kisses and working with our sexuality the way we see fit. And why, WHY is our drinking age 21?! It, among a frightening array of other things, only serves to make teens feel like teens and therefore act and think like teens, sometimes well out of their teens.

I could elaborate on all this much more if I had the energy, but I don't, and I have one other thing to hit on before I blow: the overuse of color words is a pretty reliable sign that your writing is a piece of crap. You should be able to color your writing without always having to use color. You should be able to achieve richness and texture and depth to a word-constructed environment without calling everything adjective red and adjective green and adjective yellow, all the damn time.

Alright, I've said my piece. In the end, I still love life as we know it, all of it, always always always.