Max is NOW!

Is it commonplace to be an alien of your age?
Or maybe that’s just the angst of youth becoming the resolve of adulthood…souring up like bad milk. Like most of em, I’m not really sure, and equally, I wish I were.
It’s Saturday, sometime in the early hours…I guess it’s actually Sunday, the day isn’t important. The time is probably around 3am, but again, not important. There’s a lot of people in this damn hot room: smoking, drinking, watching, talking…yelling over the music I suppose. We’re somewhere off Beverly and Alvarado, this plain old building filled with people and music and cigarettes and booze.
I’m not drunk, just a little buzzed. The worst kind of buzz. That self-aware, irritated buzz. My stomach is turning and twisting, but it’s not what I drank, it’s what I’ve seen…and see. Bodies everywhere, pushing and pulling at their seams.
Its four days before Halloween. The majority are playing their characters. OF course, I wore my costume as well. It’s stupid, but I like it. Otherwise I wouldn’t have worn it. The funny thing about this culture, though, these indie/scene kids, it’s their ability to both oppose and relish superficiality. They are just kids, mostly, so I can’t really hold it against them. They don’t live in an age of rebellion, or even the evolution of rebellion. They are at least three times removed from the rebellions of youth. Free jazz, greasers, beat culture, protests, free love, these are merely relics of the past. This, this age, the age of which I am both home and alien is evolved beyond itself. These kids rebel against themselves, the bodies of revolution. They find art and creativity in expressions of pure vanity. Shallowness is not their unfortunate end, but their goal, their hope. They are the rebellion, turned in on itself. So much so that the conventions of the past are useless. As it was said, ‘nothing is what it seems,’ here, in this room, everything is as it seems.
Their symbols are not planted in the deep roots, but only in the symbols themselves. Their irony and satire serves none but irony and satire.
And so, half-drunk, I sit at the edge of the room, smoking cigarettes wondering why I am here.
Not in that big, deep way of wondering, but in their way…wondering why I am in this
building, with these people, smoking this cigarette, asking this very self-involved question.
But none of this matters, it’s what they call ‘living in the moment’, living in the excrement on nowness. The room is too crowded for my taste. It makes me feel old when I think like that. So I sit longer…and stare and smoke.
They make me sick, really.
But I know better than to blame them, and pulling apart my own psychology is like breaking down logic. Both are too aware to let the truth bleed.
Nonetheless, I hold my nausea down. I let it boil and percolate into a ration of self-loathing any psyche would gladly devour without question. I’m too fat. I don’t dress right. My hair takes too long to style, and I’m loosing it faster than I would like. My teeth are crooked. And although smoking is sexy, discolored teeth, like mine, are not. But worst of all, I’m too self-hating. I hate that I hate myself…and
thus I hate them. They make me sick.
It’s not long before another young woman dressed in some slutty version of something is sitting next to me….on this out of place couch. Of course I’m looking at her, staring even, that’s why she wore this outfit, isn’t it? But stupid me, I don’t drool over her small ass or even pause to strip the threads off her tits in my head. I, being the idiot I am, look to her face for my kicks.
She’s sober, avoiding my eyes, avoiding my look. I take the hint and go back to my cigarette. But, I AM a masochist and a moron, so I return to her face. She looks at me accidentally and gives me a back-handed smile…I hate those.
It’s like when a girl tells you she won’t fuck you because she cares about you too much. So she smiles at me with that ‘Hi, you’re too nice to fuck me” smile, and I smile back with my “I’m harmless but willing to fuck you” smile. Eventually I get to her tits and I take in a good eye-full. Then the thighs, stripping most of her modesty, at least what was left to it in that costume. It crosses my mind how much fun it would be to tie her…well I’m not that kind of guy I guess.
So I go back to my butt of a cigarette, and flick it to the carpeted ground. I need another, but they are all gone. Too much time smoking, not enough fucking. This rooms gets old fast, so I take leave of it. The other room isn’t much different, just less smoke and better music. In the crowd there are two girls and a guy fucking as best they can with their clothes on, staying vertical. The guy has enough handfuls of tits and ass to feed a small nation. It’s like he’s pulling the first crop of the season, eager like this never happens for him. He’s hording that flesh like a dying man’s salvation, like a man who never gets laid. But he does, it’s easy to see. One girl smashes her ass into his crotch, almost to a punishing amount. The three all but short of fuck on the dance floor.
It makes me sick, they make me sick. All the evolution of man, the advent of technology and science, the grand works of fiction and every ounce of creativity, all worthless, all stupid and pointless, all filth covering the golden cunt of Aphrodite. All simply because I want to be this guy, I want to fuck these girls; I want to feel them tremble under my thumb. And I hate them so. Now clarity finds me, in this moment. I am an alien of my own age, just like everyone else. I am the same as them, I am them. I want to fuck and choke and bite and struggle.
They sicken me…I sicken me.