It was the best of times, these were the rest of times. At least Styx was no longer a band. He had that going for him. Everybody did. Everybody except, of course, Styx. They were a band that shuddered and loathed death, we must assume.
Jesus. Nothing ever quite works out for me. I just looked it up online - Styx is still touring, they regrouped in '95 and whosever responsibility it was to prevent such a thing was sleeping. Do they have no mercy at all in their hearts? Think of the children. They were our future.
I esteemed so much bad music when I was a kid, only ever partially recovering in adulthood. I don't just mean Styx, either, there were a lot of bad bands. Too many to mention. I can still go to a used record store and marvel at all of the bad choices I have made over the years. Yet I'll still walk out the door with a couple hundred dollars worth of new bad choices. I can't seem to help myself, Narcissus forever gazing at the reflection in the passing waters.
Many of my stupid addictions tend to resemble my other stupid addictions. It's not even as if I have changed very much as I've aged. I mostly just have less energy to make the same frequency and magnitude of bad choices. I create slightly less catastrophe now and it makes me sad. People avoid me more now than they once did. It is my curse. One of them. You can make tremendous mistakes when you're young and most people barely even notice. That's what I did. It is the well from which I now draw my distorted and outsized sense of misguided pride. Few find my stories to be nearly as funny as I find them to be.
Earlier tonight somebody told me to act my age. Well, in a sense that is what they told me. I said that drinking to excess is painful, that it makes me uglier and dumber. They told me that most people learn that lesson in their early twenties. I didn't want to tell them that I learned it then, also.
Some truths only flow from the stream of continued exaggeration.
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| Caravaggio |
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