Afterword

Afterword:

VS Imagination, etc.

 

(I’m blathering, so please don’t take this too seriously.)

 

There’s an old expression, “Pretty things are dirty; dirty things are pretty.” (Really.) When I first heard or read the phrase, I thought, “That’s so true,” without any actual basis for it. This might be a little challenging for normal people to grasp, but it just might be that the most unforgivable thing is something that really we should all be forgiving, and the most wonderful, widely accepted thing is something we should all be denying. I mean, sometimes I just sit around thinking about stuff like this: If hatred is a kind of love, a phrase often spouted on awful melodramas, then is not love a form of hate? And so on. Just a thought, don’t really have anything to support the idea.

 

So I’m a pretty big fan of music, but when people ask me what kind of music I like, I always end up going, “Umm…” because I just like so many different kinds. Yet when I was in school, I was so fatally bad at music class that I wound up loathing it. I couldn’t even play the recorder. My fingers wouldn’t move. I never learned to read music, either. How those little tadpoles relate to music baffled me. Of course, you all must think I was stupid, but my point is that I hated music for an awfully long time. There was a pressure involved in music at school, a sort of pervasive attitude that “people who understand music are cool and have good taste,” which all just made me go, “Forget that,” and want to run. I wasn’t able to listen to it properly until some ten years after I graduated—quite recently, actually. Now I feel like I was really missing out. Good taste has nothing to do with it; anyone can listen to good music… That whole attitude just pissed me off. I don’t know what the goal of musical education was at school, but man, did it ever backfire with me. Story of my life.

 

When splendid, important people dispense pearls of wisdom like, “Value your imagination,” or “Follow your dreams,” why does it always make you want to throw up? Always makes me want to say, “Shut up and mind your own business,” or “Screw imagination.” I see a phrase like, “The power of imagination and positive thinking,” and I want to start strapping bombs to people. I am what I am, and I’m not so good at being bright and merry. This causes me no end of trouble. I see everyone being cheery and react like I’ve come across something incredibly sinister. Sure, I can laugh with everyone, but that creeps me out more than anything. Sigh…

 

But this is a perfect example of why “Dirty things are pretty” is so very true. If you run into something creepy, then you still have to do something, right? But in that case, I’ve got to make a case for “Pretty things are dirty” just to be fair…and the more I think about it, the more I want to do something like that, which is how I’m living today.

 

I think everyone is really much, much more simple and uncomplicated. We’re all just banging our heads into whatever is right in front of us—but the world seems to be getting along just fine. Banging our heads into things seems to work. Ain’t it a shame?

 

(Are you even trying to write an afterword?)

(Ah, whatever…)

 

BGM “THE GOOD LIFE” by NEW POWER GENERATION