Being smart is a tricky thing. I won’t brag about my intellect much other than to say that throughout my life people have commented that I am, indeed, smart. Has it served me well? I would say that lacking intelligence has probably served people better than my intellect has served me. I get bored very easily, yet keep doing the same things over and over again.

I am told that college is the place for people like me. However, working class life doesn’t place the same expectations on you as in other classes, and so I never felt the drive to succeed, or the shame in not succeeding, and so I am content to be some kind of lost superman stuck into some oblivion of society.

Or maybe I’m not. Maybe I harbor a lot of hatred toward those who run this world, this place that they’ve built on a house of cards, and I’m supposed to “contribute” toward. I contribute all right; yes, I contribute vitriol and venom directed against this murderous machine. So, I would get bored and discontent where I was if I were in college. I would find myself lost in wandering thoughts, questions that have no answers, ponderings. And some of my ponderings would produce answers but I would be stuck looking at the professor, the person with knowledge. And I would ask myself what knowledge is, get caught up in what I suppose is called epistemology, and eventually conclude that there is no answer to my question, and I might as well drink the Kool-Aid because that’s all they’re offering to drink.

But it would taste bad and I would spit it out. Isn’t the point just to get an education so you can make some money and contribute something toward society? Or just to gain some knowledge? Yes, I suppose those facets of it are all intertwined but I guess what I’m trying to say is that if I were not a depressed, mad, grandiose, vitriolic poet and musician who appreciates beauty in strange things, I would not be me.

People are in trouble down here. Yes, in this mire of quicksand called working class life, people are addicted, ignorant, and prone to believing things that will get all of us killed. But having less to lose is part of working class life, isn’t it?

“Why not take this drug? You only have your life of suffering to lose.” Or how about: “Why not shun knowledge, you only have the bliss of some kind of edgy, antisocial ignorance to gain.” Or: “Why not believe the people who tell you to eat Tide Pods or inject hydrogen peroxide into your eyeballs to prevent Covid or whatever murderous lie is being conjured up by the rich-kid ideologues in the name of some kind of ridiculously pretentious Social Darwinism?” After all, we only have these repetitive lives of suffering to lose.

Are we really inferior, down here? I suppose my family was fortunate to be near the top of the heap in working class life; that we have all of the amenities of the upper middle class, although my parents worked hard for them without even caring about them. But I’ve been through all of the traps: the drugs, the alcohol, the fornication with potential to create babies that trap you into leading a hand-to-mouth existence. Some of the traps I fell into, some of them I escaped, but I could not for the life of me just go out and get a job. Something stopped me. My parents are doing fine, I suppose. As two individuals, they’ve become the kind of people you might put up on a pedestal and hand a trophy some time before they die of old age, I guess.

I’m doing better than ever, but I still have my own personal hell that someone who doesn’t understand the complexities of life might instantly say is completely of my own making (on the surface, it is). I suppose that I have become someone who lives down here, who says things that make sense to someone down here and appear like pretentious non-sense to others. Yet, here I am, down here.