Neither In Nor Out

I went to a party the other day after a long time and it was a drum and bass party and I was there alone, and the whole night I had this split feeling I never had before where I liked being there and I also wanted to get the fuck out at the same time, neither in neither out, I wanted to play the set but I did not want the people, and it was the first time in my life I felt that exact thing and I still dont know what to call it.

My disgust for people has climbed so high that it went flat, and now I dont hate them and I dont like them either, theres no fire left in it, just a dead reading on the meter, and I have no urge to please anybody and no urge to talk and no urge to engage and no urge to fit in, I just want someone to play me something good and put a beer in my hand and leave me in my corner, and thats the whole night I am asking for, and I have felt the same thing at every one of these parties for years now.

And I know it does not come from a clean place, its jealousy and its pity and its a superiority complex that I am not going to sit here and lie about, and its anger and its hate and its me sitting alone picking apart my own failures over and over, and then a bit of philosophy poured on top to make it sound like I figured something out, and its all just bad soup, all of it cooked into this one feeling that I carry through the door of every room I walk into.

The couples and the girls are the trigger every single time, and I stand there watching how many people are fucking around and the first thing my brain does is ask where do these people even find these girls, and theres the jealousy and its instant and I am not pretending its not there, but then it flips and it flips faster every year into this dead realization that none of these people are above me, and thats the part that gets me because its not a win and its not relief, its just sad, and these same girls are going to go home with the toxic guy they been grinding on all night and they will collect the trauma in six months, and the guy has been zoned out on weed since the afternoon and he is not even fully inside his own body, and somehow thats who wins the night.

And it is the same crowd every time and its rich kids, the retarded offspring of people who actually built something who are now just standing around inheriting it, and if you ask one of them what they actually do or what they make or what they are building I swear I have never once gotten a straight answer, and yeah they work because somebody has to pay for the lifestyle and the late nights and the drugs and the not having a job to wake up for, but its almost always something daddy built and they are just running it on the lowest effort that keeps the lights on, and they assume things about you in the first thirty seconds, that you smoke and that you got weed on you and that you can stay up till five because obviously you dont have anything real waiting for you in the morning, and theres this attitude on all of them, every single one, something off that you cannot put your finger on, and I told myself maybe its just the party and maybe people go weird when they are loud and high, so I went and met some of them sober at their own houses in daylight and they were still off and I still could not compute them.

And then you got the other half which is the struggling artists and most of them are just lost, plain lost, and they wont commit to anything and they wont pick a lane and all you hear from them is excuses dressed up as philosophy, like this is not sustainable but bro this is life and I would rather struggle doing what I love, and yeah okay I get it and I am not the guy telling you to go kill the thing you love and rot in a cubicle, but bro you dont got anything, not the dream and not even the basics, you got no money and no insurance and parents who quietly stopped asking how its going, and I dont say it to their face because what is the point, but somebody has to be serious because the parents are getting old and the money is not coming from nowhere and survival is sitting right there on the table the whole time, and you can love the thing and still be serious about it, and being serious is the only way you figure out how much you can let loose and what you have to hold onto for dear life, and these people let loose on everything and hold onto nothing and call it freedom.

And here is the part I do not put in front of anybody at these parties, which is that I am probably more lost than all of them, every single one, because I walk in and I scan the room and I rank everybody and I decide they are all beneath me and then I walk back out the door with no more idea of what I am doing with my life than the weed guy zoned out in the corner, and for a while I told myself maybe thats the whole trick, maybe judging the room is just the cleanest place to stand when you got no ground of your own, but the more I sit with it the less I buy that, because being lost is one thing and I will own that part, but these people are genuinely off in a way that has nothing to do with me, theres something actually not right there that I have watched up close and sober and it does not go away, so maybe both things are just true at the same time, maybe I am a mess and they are still not normal, and that is the part nobody wants to sit with, that you can be lost yourself and still be standing in a room full of people who are worse.