i am 36. one would think that, by now, i would have friends that, for the most part, weren’t stupid.
yet this is in fact not so.
now, i am not saying that my friends lack intelligence. far from it, in most cases.
i merely mean that, despite some of them being over 40, they still have the same issues that they had decades ago. issues that should be sorted in your 20’s (if you’re lucky) or your 30’s.
issues like ‘i don’t know what i want to do for a living’ and ‘my mother shits me’ and ‘i got someone pregnant by accident’ and ‘i wanna be star one day'.
now far be it for me to claim to be issue-free. (me, who has so many issues i should be a library and not a woman). but i at least understand that living means doing things you don’t like most of the time.
of course i’d rather loll about at home at home indulging my ‘creative whims’ and ‘being at one with myself’ or some shit, but the fact is i’d starve to death. and dying for your cause is not only counter-productive, it’s so very ‘out’ at the moment, darlings.
i should hasten to add that i like creative people. not that i consider myself to BE one, mind you, just that they’re on the whole less likely to be judgemental and more likely to be fun.
but that also means that my friends still think that they’re rock stars. or poets. or actors. or artists. (which, sadly, most of them actually are. but creativity and commercialism scarcely mix).
we have a musician living in a tent in our lounge room. (no, i am not kidding). not only is he talented, he is handsome, clever, funny and blindingly intelligent.
now, i can accept that he goes to bed at sunrise every single night. i can accept that he rejects the monetary culture. i can accept that he is the bluntest person on earth and says ‘you’d all eat shit, wouldn’t you ?’ to his audiences.
what i can’t accept is that he should care enough about himself to end this cycle of moving from place to place and band to band and partner to partner and crisis to crisis and just find some way to make a little life for himself.
you don’t need riches to be content, i agree. but you do need, at the very least, your dignity and your independence. dependence is never freedom, no matter how safe the supply.