Live Fast, Try To Die Young -
shape shifters
by j.charles @ textproductions
Life in general is a muther fuckin toxin. Being alive on a long enough time scale, for any male, means dying of prostate cancer. The air that you breathe in Los Angeles and New York cities is lethal enough to be classified as carcinogenic. Cars are built smaller, cheaper and quicker than ever before. Pills for everything except a solution are cheerfully prescribed to willing suburban American housewives, just like your mamma. And you wanna sit there tryna tell me that my fucking lifestyle is going to kill me.
Live fast, try to die young. James dean did it in a Porsche. I do it on a daily basis. Yeah, I said it. Fuck Darwinian procreation, fuck marriage, fuck a 401k; fuck planning for the future. My future has been taken away from me more times than I care to admit. Most of the time it was self inflicted, my survival owed to straight up perseverance of life. It’s not a death sentence, just an understanding of my finite existence. If I live like this, blunt in hand forever writing, I will die from it. If I drink myself to lullaby every night, I will die from it. If I live well into old age, I will die from it.
I do, in my defense, have a firm understanding of what my lifestyle may or may not do to me. I understand that, despite my old tendencies toward white drugs and excessive amounts of alcohol, I live a cleaner and far more active lifestyle than in my teens. But even barflies live a cleaner life than I did in my teens.
My twenties, as I watch them dwindle away into a desk job and high pressure sodium lights, do not give any more of a fuck about authority, life expectancy, liver dysfunction, than did my teen years. You would think that after a good nightstick beating you would tend to get over not lovin’ police.
So what the fuck? Die from living life, or die from running away from death? Would I rather be shot while waiting for a bus at twenty, or in a Buick when I turn two hundred? There has to be a point when you feel like it is time to go. Like everything good you could do has been done. Like nothing on your body works the way it is supposed to.
I don’t want to live to see people I love die, and neither do they. All I want to do is do my own fucking thing. Have fun in between the asshole shit god does to you, to me, to everybody. Just forget the bad, feel the good, and buy another god damn drink.