Worthless

If our past was worthless and we are worthless and the life we lead is worthless than why ever be tied down to a rose-tinted perversion of what was? If life is suffering and school was suffering and teens were suffering than surely we can remove our heads from ancient sand and at the very least uncover the new suffering that waits for us along with a future we can't construct and a past we can't escape. So on second thought, who gives a shit, it's the same value proposition whether you're weighed down by a false past or overwhelmed by a false future. A sad song is a sad song is a sad song. Lie in bed and mix regrets with longing, wait until you freeze and let it all wash over you. Destroy your nostalgia for what has happened and get rid of the fear of what has yet to happen, they say, in between ethanol and tobacco and other faintly nascent rhymes. It's all the same worthlessness. Put the song on repeat and do it again.

Where Dreams Can Fester

Write that novel you've been kicking around
Bust out your paint brushes and see what happens
There's lots of free audio software to record stuff with these days

So are the types of phrases one might commonly hear when one professes to desiring some sort of financial and popular success in the creative arts. Yet, it is commonly assumed that many people never actually do pursue said creative outlet, instead letting their ideas - good or bad they may be - fester and languish in their imagination. This has been called laziness by some, or pessimism by others, and a host of other negative connotations. Given, however, that ideas in one's imagination can have the kind of success and reach that when put to reality they can not, and that while still festering, unpursued, can reside in pleasant daydreams and delusions of grandeur, one must wonder if not putting pen to paper, so to speak, is actually the optimist's route, and that attempting to achieve that of which can not be achieved in the first place, is ultimately the darker, less rewarding path, for it is only in one's wildest imagination that success can ever be attained.

Stronger

If taken to its logical extreme, the statement "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" would seem to condone certain harmful activities that do not kill you but might degrade your health. For instance, smoking regularly would not necessarily kill you immediately nor, as deadly as it is, be your cause of death. Indeed, one could utilize the statement as a sort of nihilist hedonist creed, if one were to do simply apply the statement in its most absurd, literal fashion. In that regard, one might be pressed to find ways in which anything that doesn't kill you does indeed make you stronger, and not, as all things, simply reduced to suffering and dread.

As Do All Things

I suppose it's the nature of things that bonds break. Cells break down. Body breaks down. We all say that everything dies but the process of death is a gradual destruction of the very things, matter, that holds us together. Sometimes the very things that matter. There's a movie that says that we move apart at 5 centimeters per second, or the speed cherry blossoms fall. That's probably too literal.

I don't know where my best friend from elementary school is. I know he is here in town, to the extent that he is alive and owns a business, and I know that he has a serious girlfriend, but I can not speak to anything else. We were once inseparable. Now if we were to sit down at the same table it'd be nothing but awkward silence and forced conversation.

My best friend from junior high was a bully. I don't know that he was a friend, ever, but I guess I put up with it because everyone was a bully then and at least it gave me social structure. He went to New York to study film. I stopped talking to him after one last one hour phone call where he lied, repeatedly, to me. Sometimes I wonder if it's worth reaching out. He sends me a happy birthday text every year and asks me to respond. I have no idea where he lives, what he is doing, or even how his looks have changed. All I've been able to gather is that 10 years of busting his ass off to get involved in making film never panned out. I guess even bullies get to suffer with the rest of us.

I couldn't tell you what a single former classmate is doing. Maybe it's for the best. I didn't really like how they treated me, many of them. But at some point I made the decision to not know a single person here in town and be the cherry petal that lands on a sidewalk and then gets picked up by a gust of wind and drifts into a shady looking alleyway with nothing else. Overdone metaphor be damned.

I'm sure it will happen again. As do all things, the bonds and connections break, the distance becomes to great. Between work, and family, and personalities, and change, and all the other modern stressors and contrivances. I'm sure the new friend I am seeing will eventually become just another dormant contact on a Facebook page full of nothing but them, our social media sites time capsules into a past we can't escape but at times want to relive. But even those memories, of past friendships, of past joys and heartaches, fade into obscurity. As do all things.