The smell of toast, a shooting pain down your left arm, a massive explosion inside your lungs. It’s what they’ve been warning you all this time- it’s a heart attack.
All right, calm down, calm down, let’s think about this. Those unhealthy snacks probably didn’t do you any good. It was probably all of those cigarettes you had, you did start when you were fourteen so it’s not like you can fault anyone else. They did taste good back then, sweet, smoky, the first puff after a long day would be a veritable heaven. Maybe if you’d paid more attention in all of those Physical Development classes… but that doesn’t even bear considering. No one should pay attention in those classes, secondary school in general. What does it do? What are all of the German teachers doing? Can any of their graduates speak German six months after leaving? Can any of us do Quadratic Equations, those fearmongers in our youths, after finishing up with the whole of mathematics. Sometimes it’s difficult to count without using fingers, that’s the amount of skill degraded from your soft, soft brain.
But then, if you weren’t paying attention in class, what were you doing? Nurturing a secret crush on that special someone you were always going to approach but could never quite find the right words and then the partings of the ways- oh, so that problem sorted itself out. They just stopped being in the same vicinity as you every day. You can lament all you like but they’re never seeing you again. Game over buddy.
If you’re unlucky in love at high school, what makes the real world any better? Your odds have not gone up, they’ve gone down. Now you have to sell yourself because people probably won’t spend a second glance on you. You don’t eat right, your exercise is pitiful, you’re constantly sitting down, you don’t have a lot to offer. You try and make it work though; make your hair presentable, wear slimming and cliquey clothes, it’s a hit-and-miss process these days.
Actually, why is it a hit-and-miss process? All of those trends nowadays changing every time someone sneezes. The good old days when you didn’t have to update what you wore for a year, now it seems it’s every ten minutes. Younger kids can go bother about with that, you don’t have enough time or energy or money to give yourself fully to the fashion, riding the trends was so much easier in those good old days.
Why didn’t you enjoy those good old days? Because you didn’t know any better? Or because you were having too much fun. Where did they go anyway? Did they just sort of melt away or have they been recycled for the kids? You didn’t have to get up so early, Saturdays were the day when your cartoons were on, it passed you by too quick.
In fact, the only things that don’t pass you by quickly are the agonizing pains. The partner who broke your heart, you’re liable to see them now than ever. The garbage bags that seem to fill too quickly, what are people putting in them? You don’t get enough time to read the books you want because that time has been reallocated to sitting on the sofa watching television you didn’t care much for anyway. God, remember all of those hours spent watching television with a burning passion? Wholesome, moral stuff, as opposed to the dribble given out today. Seriously, where are all of these producers getting their material from? Are all the typescripts from Monkeys attempting Shakespeare just being formatted onto scripts and sent to the TV network? In which case, do the monkeys know they’re attempting Shakespeare or is someone proof-reading fifteen thousand copies of the Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer?
OK, OK, relax. Somewhere from the swamp of your memory, you dig up some information on heart attacks. There was that one article you read that said that you have thirty seconds from your heart stopping until you pass out. Thirty whole seconds. You put on a genuine smile.
Time for one last cigarette.
No comments:
Post a Comment