I’m always kinda bummed I have wasted the majority of my life so far…social media bad, but it was depressing seeing a lot of people I went to highschool with have a bunch of different adventures and shit and really grow into themselves as people in their late teens and early 20’s and I was kinda just depressed all the time thinking exactly what I’m thinking right now and not really knowing how or what to do to live a “better” life.

I haven’t really done anything. I guess I’m scared to, but I have to wonder how much of my life is due to my socioeconomic and racial position. Maybe this is an invalid criticism but I think that growing up watching lots of TV implants you with a certain idea that you can get the things you want in life in spite of the very real barriers that you have in front of you. I think in some way I internalized the idea that I was going to live life as a middle class white person (and I do think this is why my older brother and sister hate being of Mexican descent and also despise my parents) and the disconnect between what I am and what I wanted to be has never really been reconciled, but I also tend to think that I do not know who I wanted to be, and that I had always desired and image of a life that would confer a status that ameliorates the shame of the realness of my actual class standing, and not something that is in line with who I am and what I valued. I think as well that some people do not ever even get the chance to find themselves either, as no life can germinate from rotten soil. I remember so many of the day laborers and other uneducated workers I grew up around, and how they all seemed to be lacking some quality that the richer people I came to know later in life had: they were more concerned with the temporal, with the real and not with the world of abstractions of self and personhood and ambition. Their primary motive is to survive, and what personality and individuality they do have has been shaped and cheapened by the drudgery of working class life. You will not learn poetry at 7, you will learn to day drink with your drywaller father. You will not go to SAT Prep and inculcate Yates, you will see the gates of juvy, and be branded a misfit. Your twenties will be the hot sun of the California days imprinting themselves on your neck the same way every derivative imprints itself in the synapses of the 19 year old college freshman. You will not go to heaven, you will just go to work.

Of course, I think I'm being a bit too maudlin for my own good. I have had a shitty life in some respects but it's also been better than the lives of most ugly Mexican kids plopped out as anchor babies. Thanks to California's decent gibsmedat programs (as the right likes to call it) I had free preschool, migrant ed with formalized Spanish education, and subsidized college and I was lucky enough to live somewhere that had an alternative program for highschool dropouts so I wasn't totally fucked by my poor decisions and I am literate enough to read all this crazy shit about communism and other failed ideologies that have been vanquished, curbstomped, and dusseldorfed into oblivion, but I still have a lot of things that mark me as fucking weirdo. Sometimes I think I'm far too in my own head. The curse of an introspective mind by nature is that you can get stuck in a dialogue that never ends, if I just excise this tendency, fix this, what if I said this wrong, etc. you become the very thing you have always wanted to avoid. Too timid to live life. Should life be lived? "God never lived so why should I?" as the great philosopher Ryan Wilson once said...considering throwing it away, but at the same time, it's yours. Even then, something so unique, so valuable: do you really want to tarnish it? Better to keep in pristine, hiding in the garage.

I'm dumb.