You can’t expect people, even your friends, to understand the inner workings of your other relationships, intimate or not.
Bonds will break. We’ll be alright.
Xanax, beer, The Evil Dead (1981). Long day ahead of me in LA tomorrow.
:)
Sometimes I ask myself why I even bother trying to shed light on social issues, especially when I know that the people I’m addressing aren’t going to put aside their ignorance long enough to really consider the perspective I’m offering them. They’re entitled to their opinions, and when I disagree with them and I’d like to be able to change them, I’m still well too aware that I can’t if they’re not willing to listen. Even when I despise their opinion, and think it’s wrong (like they mine), ultimately I just want them to THINK, not HATE.
Some days, like today, and some conversations, like today’s, make me want to throw hope off the balcony. Days like this I feel like I wasn’t born with enough middle fingers. I hear myself proclaiming:
“Fuck you, everyone and everything. I’m done, man, I’m done. I’m tired of fighting for the misunderstood, the unjustly demonized, for common decency, love, and most of all a basic level of respect for all living things. I’m retiring my sense of righteous indignation, moving away from hope, and I’m breaking up with optimism. I’m going to move in with relentless cynicism and go live in the middle of bumfuck nowhere apathy where I’ll masturbate relentlessly and watch T.V. ‘til my body gets around to dying.”
The worst part about feeling this defeated is that I know it’s something that I’m going to feel on a regular basis for the rest of my life, but why? Probably because I feel like it’s my duty, but no one assigned it to me— I just took it upon myself to do my best to combat ignorance, mine and everyone else’s. It makes me cry, embarrassing as it is to admit, to feel like I’m never going to make a difference in improving the state of mind of our society. It hurts to think that I may never have an impact even on one person in a way that positively impacts the world around us, because that’s how I would deem myself successful at the end of my life.
Somehow, though, I talk myself into unpacking hope and putting it back on the mantle, because I will always have hope, even if it sometimes gets put into storage for an undefined amount of time, that we can create a more tolerant world…but, tolerance shouldn’t be what we strive for, it should be a given. I want more than tolerance, I want understanding and love for your fellow man regardless of class, sexuality, gender, race, creed and all those other ways of categorizing people for the sake our own comfort, but it starts with establishing tolerance. If I can, at the very least, contribute to the establishment of greater tolerance, I would feel great about what I had done with my life. No matter how much or how little money I make, the types of assets I acquire, I can’t take any of that with me. I can leave it behind, but it will be spent and gone for good. What I can leave behind, and something my soul can retain, is a legacy of a genuine desire for a safer, more loving, and fair society for future generations to adopt and raise into something more tangible, more substantial, than hope.
(via galacticbadness)
(Source: horsehitcherkind, via galacticbadness)
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(Source: prendstadope, via crackrockandglowsticks)
My sister just called, my cousin died tonight. Cancer, in case no one is wondering. So now I’m drinking in bed.