No doubt old Fitzy boy knows how to write , but any old fool can paint a pretty picture with a few fancy words . This side of paradise is written under the pretense of a young lad trying to find himself , but what makes this cringe-worthy is that the young lad seems to take himself *gags* SERIOUSLY. The result of this is a pretentious and useless account of a self-indulgent young person’s identity struggle. The last thing anybody wants to read are the bullshit-stained , hooey gooey , abstract personality conclusions of SOMEBODY ELSE. We are shallow people who are constantly self-interested. Amory can rot and turn into dust for all I care. 

“We are unerring in our choice of lovers, particularly when we require the wrong person. There is an instinct, magnet, or aerial which seeks the unsuitable. The wrong person is, of course, right for something - to punish, bully, or humiliate us, let us down, leave us for dead, or, worst of all, give us the impression that they are not inappropriate, but almost right, thus hanging us in love’s limbo. Not just anyone can do this.”

“It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody. And the people under the sky were also very much the same - everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same - people who had never learned to think but were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world.”—George Orwell, 1984

We’ve all written any number of things.

Half-assed replies , awkward text messages, high school essays ,angst-ridden poems, secrets scrawled on crumpled bits of paper , the occasionally terrible letter to a man in a leather chair , and let’s be honest, we’ve all secretly wished we’d written a decent love letter or two, but never really got the chance. And right now I’m watching the clock creep forward in this dismal looking bedroom with the hazy glow of 4PM and let me assure you, the whole thing is entirely unromantic. I’m just trying to give you some spiel here, an attempt to come across as dark and charismatic. Though I’m not too sure how it’s going to work, seeing as this dreary and boring day is just that – dreary and boring. Quite morbid actually. 

I made a sort of pact with myself this morning, about how I wouldn’t philosophize or romanticize or try to be intellectual. Because quite frankly I’m not intellectual ,though I think at a point I wanted to be . But this all sounds very rich coming from somebody who’s trying to produce half-decent words on a page - words that aren’t very coherent or meaningful , words that don’t lead anybody anywhere , that don’t have a purpose or an ending or substance. I suppose the whole thing reads like a severely flawed and absurd novel. Very pretentious, very rare , very horrid. 

I think I began with the intention to reflect upon the little,irrelevant pieces of writing that hold our lives together , something about the words we churn out of our systems on a daily basis . From my experience I know that these are usually utter bullshit , and I guess I would have gone on to comment about how sometimes something brilliant comes along , but it doesn’t ,and that’s just one of those things I like to think when I have too much time on my hands. 

What I really want is to make all this boring stuff accidentally very special , so I pick out details like the way the sun is spilling out of the window , and how cold my toes are , and how there’s something very romantic about a dirty ash-tray that’s full to the brim. 

And now I’m suddenly walking down the street, a small and empty street … I’d rather not say where , because that would involve a story I don’t know how to tell very well yet. But I’m walking , and I just want to go around and look at things, even though I’m not supposed to . I don’t know why that is , but I’m not. And there’s music playing somewhere , and it’s suddenly so cold , and I want to cry because I don’t have lights on tall buildings and all those things that make you wonder. I have this. I have stale coffee and cheap cigarettes , a long line of sick dis-satisfactions and half-shit worries. 

It was a quintessentially gray afternoon. Wet,gloomy , veiled by memory and resplendent with misery while laughter and tragedy and nothingness all walked around hand in hand. Judging from the way the sky looked , it was the kind of day when everyone had the right to be pissed off - but I was in Islamabad and if you’ve ever felt Islamabad - not seen , felt - then you’ll know that this particular combination is nothing short of breathlessness. I was being stupid . I was pretending to be a soul of the lost generation driving around those streets that are either reeking with decay or stinking of money and I felt happy and depressed all at the same time. I thought of how fucked up everything was but how it wouldn’t always be that way. Even though the car was foggy with cigarette smoke and my fingers sticky with chocolate my spirit was rife with a glamorous ignorance. In that brief spell of joy, I kept confirming with my conscience that I didn’t give a damn and so I went home with a pleasant little twist to my face. 

And I told myself that we would all drift away into an insipid correctness , there wouldn’t be color or brilliance or terrible,dreadful beauty , and I figured that maybe I was naive and shallow for being terrified of that - what I had imagined was the eerie and dismal silence of years , of sorrow and joy and spectroscopic flight of fancy and everything in between. I dreamt up the London of my childhood and wove it before my eyes , I stood around in shabby streets of third-world political chaos and convinced myself I would turn to dust if I stayed on forever. I was stupid and skeptical and I was aware of it but I didn’t give a damn. I never could decide what was better , the grounded stability of nothing to nothing or the chaotic rawness of something and everything , of painting a pretty universe and then having it shattered before your eyes or of having no romanticized ideal to begin with. I think I just wanted warmth , a gooey and effortless thing , a long line of sincere banter and itching restlessness and breathless afternoons followed by lukewarm mugs of coffee - and yet , I don’t think I ever did forget how childish I was being. Me and my subconscious agreed that this whole existence/life business was all grayness and it was much better in books.