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Teenage Wasteland: Regarding the rebellion of youth

(1/10)




All in all, writing a book is not a rational decision. Even if there is a chance for the book to turn all right, you need to dedicate time, concentration, preparation, and (most of all) delusion.


The odds of a biological unit like me to say something meaningful are pretty slim. The odds of achieving reasonable sales and maybe even writing a popular book, so that my ego is satisfied, are close to zero.


But there's a thing nobody tells you about writers. The writer, the painfully truthful one, is simply rebellious. The reason is: words, right or wrong words, express rage against the Universe.


We are all going to die. The sun will stop burning. The Universe will grow cold in Brownian motion. And still, man writes on their caves, demanding to be historically relevant. Proclaiming to be immortal, just because they once existed.


Teen bullshit if you ask me, but an honorable kind of bullshit.


I do remember what it meant to be truly young. What it meant to get drunk, to start fights, to want it all, and to think you'll survive everything.


I've spent many forgettable nights in the old Dewar's pub (now non-existent) in the city centre, where beer and cockroaches were our friends. At Uni, I reset my mind after studying Genetics with industrious quantities of pure vodka no ice. In these self-destructive urges, looking for love, happiness, and myself, I even tried hard drugs, which obliterated my psyche for years to come.


I am not advertising. The bottom of the glass has nothing except for the few drops that beg for another glass. But much like substances, art and writing are a reflection of the same thing.


Rebellion against the present. Rebellion against injustice. The refusal to submit to the cold Universe by closing yourself within your own soul.


But alcohol and drugs always made me stupid, albeit temporarily happy. They destroyed my body and poisoned my mind. There is no growth in substances.


Whereas, writing allows you to see your own thoughts and then, after enough time passes, to see what has been meaningful in your writing, and what was dumb. It allows you to become meaningful, to bare your teeth and grin honestly at the meaninglessness and the absurd.


My youth went away, even though I am not particularly old yet, but they did teach me something important.


Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.

This is the secret to true happiness. To be mad at injustice. To call it out by its true name. Not to drink, not to dope, not to destroy yourself. To go into the world and change it.


To resist a world which merely sounds correct, sounds right, but pushes out an inhumane reality.


And when someone in that world tells you that you are thinking incorrectly, that the world is ugly, that justice does not exist, to look them right in the eye.


And "in wrong words" to defend the goodness of humanity.



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