Fucked up things you do when you’re sad.

You imagine who’d be at your bedside if you were dying of cancer, and then you listen to John Frusciante’s “Dying Song” on repeat until you stop feeling sorry for yourself. You’re not dying, you silly idiot. Almost everyone loves you—or some version of you—and you don’t get to pretend otherwise. Nor do you get to drop out of the scene pretending your life is so hard, when you’re the one making it hard.

You think about that poster of Frank Zappa on the toilet. The raw intimacy of it. The authenticity of dropped veneers, and how you prefer peeks inside lives like that. You try thinking of a modern equivalent to “Phi Zappa Krappa”, but you can’t. You become slightly anhedonic thinking about how so much of what consumes our time—art, music, love—seems composed of artificial moments. It makes you long for another place lodged deep in the memory where we all were what we said we were, and nobody castigated us for it. But most of modern life feels like it’s not formed by stars colliding. You wonder what really lies beneath all the disguises we wear that make us look pretty and unexposed. You’ve always loathed this about yourself—the way people seem to admire you the most when you’re hitting your marks and playing a part.

You Google paintings by Basquiat and Kent Monkman, briefly contemplating draining the family savings just to see what it would be like to hang resistance on your wall.

You pick a fight with a man. Any man, really.

You wait till it’s late and you get in the car and you drive until you end up in some bougie neighbourhood with pristine lawns and unrecognizable street signs. You feel irritated by the perfect asphalt and the soft glow of warm lights and the smell of tax evasion. You wonder if the new money families living inside have empty lives to go along with their beautiful things. Do they even know their children exist? Do they read to them each night and teach them about suffering? You decide they probably don’t, thus the next generation will continue to be made up of greedy assholes. You panic, becoming more despondent at the thought of this. You ignore the incessant phone calls from your worried spouse because as much as he tries to understand you, he can’t. You let your insides battle it out until they find their way home.

And sometimes you scream.