Day Sixty-Four: Another Excerpt (Dialogue)

by Tom Noonan

“I’ve been thinking a lot lately.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, about why we always need to get fucked up, to smoke and shit.  Our parents did it, but they didn’t need it.  They were just making a point.”

“Yeah, it was political thing.”

“Exactly, they smoked to blow that shit in the police’s face.  They did it for the smell, so the stench might stain the streets.  They smoked to fuck with everyone.  All we did was make the same shit stronger, everything they had, we just took it further, to fall deeper into ourselves and let what was left get devoured.”

“You think our lives are tougher?”

“No, I don’t think that, not tougher.  We just grew up wrong.  It’s all because of George Fucking Lucas.”

“Star Wars George Lucas?”

“Exactly, that Tolkien headed fuck did this to us.  You know, he’s the reason for all this bullshit we have to take.  If he’dve just left the trilogy alone, then, fuck, we’d be fine, smoking bowls in our parents faces once they grew a conscience about it all.”

“So shitty movies make you do drugs?”

“No, it’s not the fact that they’re shitty that did it.  They’re fine movies, but they’re also fucking evil.  When he made them, he knew everyone was going to see them, that a whole new generation would grow up alongside them.  And he fucked us.”

“I’m not following.”

“He gave our parents the heroes and we got the villain.  They grew up seeing the good in everyone, but we only saw what a fucked up mind can do to a kid, what would happen when you try and train a prodigy who had a few side effects.”

“Side effects?”

“Mental issues.  That kid was always fucked up, they warned Obi-Wan, but he went along with his plan anyway and tried training him.”

“So we’re trying to get over that tragedy?”

“No, we’re that kid.  All of us are fucked up a little bit, we have to be.  It’s the only 100% certainty of growing up in America, that you come out of it a little fucked up.  And we watched that kid become the villain our parents hated.  We’ve watched it over and over again, memorized each step, seen the hate fill him up.  And then we see it around us, feel it like a tic trying to burrow in, knowing we can only fight it off for so long.  So we smoke and take pills and drink, we do it all at once, give ourselves over to it, so that we might die.  We do it to kill ourselves, to stop the story before it reaches the end.”