There is this chimeric aphorism which emerged from the lips of Horace (the oh-captain-my-captain Robin Williams) and we adopted: Carpe diem, seize the day, live the day as if it were your last, YOLO!
We were captivated by it when we were young, we practiced and shouted it out loud some days, especially when these days were full of celebration and unexpected happiness, we felt it when we made our own small revolutions by quitting our humdrum job in a spectacular fashion or by cutting loose from the toxic relationship we were in or by getting a one-way ticket for a destination, any destination, yelling: to hell with it!
It’s this eruptive carpe diem of the first youth.
You had never been a youth if you never fucked everything up for once (or maybe twice or thrice) in your life. You don’t count as a feeling human being if you have never gone apeshit, if you have never turned your back to something certain, but simultaneously boring for something precarious, but luring while shouting out: Get stuffed you morons!
There could be some kind of a test, like one of these that pop up on Facebook or the one that Mr. Peter goes through to figure out if you’ll be allowed to pass the gates of heaven or you’ll head to limbo (this is a nondescript place, like the waiting room at the dentist caught between heaven and hell; and it lasts for eternity).
QUIZ: How many times did you fuck everything up in your life?
a)Never
b)Once
c)Twice
d)Quite many
e)Don’t remember/Can’t answer
And the next question, the most important, would be: When it was the last time that you fucked everything up in your life?
Maybe it strikes as rather strange to the younger ones, but as the years go by this ‘craziness’ is less likely to appear.
Schizophrenia, the psychiatrists maintain, occurs in the age between 20 and 30. After this point you may suffer from depression, panic attacks and a ton of other things, but as regards schizophrenia you are marked safe.
In a similar manner people go crazy and they fuck everything up until their late thirties. This is not to say that it won’t happen beyond this age, but the likelihood of such yolo-events to take place is severely diminished.
A small-scale seize-the-day fit around forties for women and forty-five for men is to be expected, yet it is not too far-fetched (mostly it has to do with red painted hair, last-ditch attempts for sexual liberation, age regressions and old-rockers groups, adulteries and long distance running shoes).
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A writer said once that a forty-year old belongs to their family and to the state. They have no right to go mad, to fuck everything up. They have to work to raise their children, they have to earn money to pay the taxes and the bills.
Their carpe diems are limited to their free time, which as a rule is not plenty, and before they seize the day they have to arrange their schedule to fit their partner’s, they have to deduct the obligations pertained to the children, then add the potential adversities, multiply by the fraction of the remaining money, divide with the attached mischances, calculate the square root of every social engagement and square the psyche of the day.
What is left does not resemble remotely the famous seize-the-day of our beloved Williams and Horace. Usually, it sounds more like: ”I want to stay alone for a minute; do nothing, hear no-one. Just for a minute!”
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Revolution is over shortly after thirties, at best. It is over when you can’t be the way you want to be because you have to be as you must be.
You are up to the ears in this whole situation (call it routine if you want) which provides you the food and the vacation. Short getaways become your new YOLOs. Five days on the chain gang traded for a Saturday-night intoxication and a Sunday-morning coffee. Eleven months at the sweatshop exchanged for ten days at the sea and you should be thankful for it, what else do you want, jam on it?
New washing machine (and a dryer, too you lucky man?), kettle and glasses from IKEA, smart phone which obviously outsmarts you since you can’t take your eyes off it and a tablet for the kid to keep it busy while you are scrolling through Facebook.
Settlement for the natural gas and the electric utility (we had a heavy winter this year) and fried squids (frozen) for Ash Monday. YOLO!
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And then you get some sleep. And when you wake up…you can’t even remember your dreams, at best, or if you do it pisses you off. And you get up, you curse and you go on. You curse you are alive, you curse you woke up, but this isn’t strange to you anymore, it is part of your life.
Do you curse because you woke up? Do you curse because you are alive?
You’re doing something wrong, can’t be, we must be doing something wrong. Before you change the world, before the world changes you, put your finger on what makes your life miserable, find out what is it in this world that nettles you. Begin with yourself; put yolos, carpe-diems, seize-the-days and other aphorisms aside.
Because in the end, or maybe just before the end, at the eleventh hour, maybe only then, beyond the wrinkles, the extra fat and the obligations, beyond the weariness and the unfulfilled dreams, in spite of the love affairs you never had them as you dreamed of and all the trips that remained in your bucket list, regardless of all these things you expected, and you still do, from your children to do in your name, despite all these goals you never achieved, or those you didn’t even go after, or even those you did go after but you let them go, past every yolo, carpe diem and seize-the-day that didn’t last, there is you, in front of the mirror, more aged than ever, more tired than you can bear, just before the end of the show, you flash a toothless smile and you tell yourself quietly, without any exaggeration: “Yolo mate, seize the fuckin’ day”.
And just before you kick the bucket you do something you never, or anybody else, thought you would.
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Sanejoker’s Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/sanejoker/
Translated by Alexandros Mantas:
https://residuosmentales.bandcamp.com/releases
