DANIEL VACCERELL HAS TOO MANY CLONES

Emerald

Everyone’s miserable sometimes.

Let me back up. You’re probably in love with someone right now; you, the abstract reader and you the specific — whether it’s known or not. Human beings are mechanically or biologically programmed to love, to facilitate stronger bonds and therefore stronger children. It just takes all the poetry out of it when you realize “she’s pretty” means “our DNA would combine excellently to propagate the species”. How can you write a sonnet with the science fiction song of implanted probability singing in your bones? How you can you write a love song that isn’t “hey, baby, would you fuck me already?”

There’s no answers anymore. That’s part of getting older. You like the bands you like and you like the certain friends’ facebook statuses and some mornings you wake up and almost don’t go to work, and sometimes you get drunk and dance with a stranger and sometimes you stay at home and watch an episode of something utterly forgettable that completely entrances you. But you don’t have answers. There’s no psychedelic spirit of truth urgently prying you apart. There’s no identity-throttling victory to be had. Every metropolis is full of scavengers clinging to the void and every bad drug-hungry party has a few con men of the soul peddling all the fast charm and long shots in the world while you pile scam after scam on the dilapidated corpses of exploration and expansion.

Live with it, I guess. The television’s on. Someone’s a man, someone’s a woman, and that’s a cold war that’ll never end. The government is a gangster’s racket with an uncomfortable grim smile. Someone’s got a couple fingers deep in the gasping, panting sexy end of the world. Your ex is probably doing something more fun than you.

There’s laws of thermodynamics and there’s Yeats quotes and then there’s the stone truth that you’re going to die and every fantasy in the world is just another cockroach scuttling away from the light. You have to face your own insignificance as a chance for freedom. Nature is unforgiving. Human nature probably even less so. It’s weird to be a narcissistic unyielding monkey sitting on a staircase watching colors and listening to syncopation and talking about art, right? Or maybe it’s one hundred percent normal.

Then theres the “answers”; God, no-God, personal-God, frigid rationality, terrifying emptiness, substances, sex, or a dazzlingly predictable combination of the aforementioned so you can sleep at night without screaming that someday you’ll be too old to move and then if you’re lucky you’ll be launched — well, where whatever happens, happens. We’re built with a fear of death not because death is scary but to make us reproduce more efficiently. We’re built to philosophize…why? What evolutionary advantage does knowing things serve? People don’t change. Just the toys.

Anyway, what I’m saying is — vinyl records do sound better, and some shirts are nicer, and yeah, there’s good vodka and bad vodka. You have to live with it, you know? Some days it rains.