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I want you to imagine a life different than your own. Method acting of sorts. Since I am writing for Iskra, your first purely theoretical action will be to take a shower, actually using a conditioner product besides the 3-in-1, and perhaps clipping your crusty ass nails. Because today you are not a fat retard on discord. Today you are an arrogant trust fund retard at a large American university.
Our story begins one day in college or late high school. You scroll absentmindedly through TikTok, seeing the posts and lives of celebrities on public display. Your envy for their fame starts small. But day after day, it eats at you. You’ve waited things before, of course. Perhaps years ago, you lusted after a shiny new toy or clothes in stores and catalogs. But back then, all it took to alleviate such suffering was a swipe of dad’s credit card. Now you’re faced with something more amorphous – perplexingly, something you can’t buy. And so this feeling only swells, this desire only broods, and you want this fame more and more.
Some time later your friends invite you to a concert. You look up there at the stage, fascinated. Beyonce, Travis Scott, Caroline Shaw, it doesn’t matter to you. The music itself irrelevant – no, you’re entranced by the very concept of up there. You live in a home with the tallest hedges and were educated in a school with the oldest gates. Your father golfed at only the most private clubs and your mother couldn’t be seen with anything except the most exclusive bags. The price of these things was never of issue or relevance; Money has always been immaterial to you. When you vacationed, you were always attended to by a legion servants, and one of the first things your parents taught you was how to bestow their 10% tip. Each crisp $10 bill you handed over was an implicit contract, the same one that allowed your mother to be cruel to your housekeeping staff and your father to spend late nights in the office with his secretary. In this way your whole life has been defined by hierarchical contrast, a corporeal pyramid where money was valuable only so far as it entitled you alone to the capstone. But now, you are looking up… inspiring the horrifying realization that you’ve fallen to the base, and your money can’t save you.
How can they be on stage, while you are all the way down here? What could possibly be so special about this performer, this trained monkey? Inside you know that you deserve the same… but how? You don’t have any musical inclination: you can’t sing, you can’t write, and there’s nothing you can play. You’re talentless, your upbringing systematically preventing any natural growth of creativity. But you still need to get up there – how do you do it?
The answer actually turns out to be quite simple, and comes to you through an art form that produces nothing original and yet delivers the vanity of fame you seek anyway. You go home, buy a DJ deck, and download the latest release from Fred Again.
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