Quarantine Me With The Cool Kids

I love the cool kids. I love the pretty ones. The ugly ones. The ones who give you free cocaine and the ones who won’t even chip in for the cab ride home. I love their consuming bangs, their well-worn jewelry, their winklepickers, vintage shirts, spiced rum. I love their anorexia and overwhelming sense of superiority.

I love showing up at an underground bar on a weeknight and for it to be littered with models, and musicians and those desperate wanderers that you’re not quite sure what they do but they’re always dressed well and show up at exhibition openings for the free wine.

I love to throw parties and for no one to show up until after midnight, totally out of their minds. I love how they drink every drop of alcohol you’ve got hidden in your washing machine then leave in droves when they find there’s some place better to be.

I love how irony becomes a safety net for every one of their pathetic interests and mainstream fascinations. I love how they stick together, how they flock together, how they fill up trendy cafes and spill out of cheap Japanese restaurants.

I love the cool kids because most of the time they dream bigger than just being cool. They want to take photos. Make movies. Write music. Paint pictures. They read contemporary American fiction, they recite Oscar Wilde, they collect Zombies records, they wear hats, drink coffee, read old issues of Vogue and they let all these things incite and inspire them.

Even if their band sucks.

Even if their art is base and imitative.

Even if their blogs are trite, inorganic and self-indulgent.

Even if they carry on like hopeless drifters, never creating anything. Achieving nothing. There was once a time, if only a fleeting moment, when they dreamed big. When they stood for something.

Even if it’s the kind of standing that’s more like slouching slovenly in a pair of baggy camel chinos smoking durries until you die. Isn’t that better than being trapped in a pinstripe business suit, living on your knees?