Dear Diary: .
- Shellac — Dude Incredible
- Tea, black, two sugars
- Tired, bored, mostly tired
You’re tired today. Then again, that’s not a change from the norm — you’re always tired. It’s because you don’t sleep, and you don’t sleep because your thoughts always go at a million miles an hour when you get into bed, and your thoughts go at a million miles an hour because you’re anxious, and you’re anxious because — well, that’s the question. You’ve always been the anxious type, even though the first time you tried to talk to Mum about it she said you weren’t and that you should pull yourself together. Then, when you tried to tell her you were depressed, she said you should get your thyroid checked.
A different generation, you suppose, not that there’s really such a thing. There is no Ful Stop between generations, and that truth will really mess you up, if you love to talk about Boomers and Zoomers and that new one, Cillenials. That’s what your girlfriend always says she is, but let’s be honest, she’s a Zoomer — just a bad one. There’s not much TikTok but there is a lot of Gram, which is a sort of crossover Millennial/Zoomer thing.
Phones won’t even be a thing in the not-too-distant. You read about the Vision Pro yesterday while you couldn’t sleep, and you don’t know what to think. On the one hand it makes you think of that Black Mirror episode with the guy from RocknRolla where they have cameras inserted into their eyes where his girlfriend cheats on him and he has to go through the footage of her fucking some other bloke to make sure their kid is really his. On the other hand it makes you think of the hologram computers from Minority Report which, being honest, look pretty cool. Then again, it didn’t really end that well in that film either, because the system could be cheated. But, then again, there’s always going to be someone who figures out a way to cheat the system.
You’d sigh if you had the energy. Russian prisoner-soldiers not receiving their pardons, people fleeing from Iceland, Taylor Swift winning four Grammys — when will it all end? You loathe a cliché, but humans really don’t know how to set their priorities straight. Shit music, shit geopolitical decisions, and shit ideologies abound. Not that all the music’s shit, of course, but even people who like the shit music admit it’s shit. They listen to it ironically, in a culture already so steeped in irony it isn’t sure if it exists any more at all. A culture that praises crap like Taylor Swift while it ignores stuff like Shellac.
That’s not entirely fair, actually — Shellac is music for musicians. It’s fine not to like it. You’re just grumpy because you’re tired, because you couldn’t sleep, because your mind was going at a million miles an hour, etc. usw. usf. But you have to play with the band tonight, and you’re going to play well, tired or not. It’s time to sing.
