I DON’T KNOW WHETHER TO LAUGH OR CRY
Sun. October 5, 2003Categories: Abstract Dynamics
no, I have the pallor of the Lower Middle Class, the self defeating approach to life, the belief it stops here with job with lifelessness. I don’t know why they have an illness called Depression. That’s just being Lower Middle Class isn’t it? The intelligence but not the confidence to express it, the rising anger that rarely erupts. From Sean’s blog, Crumbling Loaf . Crumbling Loaf has made an art of too close-to-the-bone, painfully funny, funnily painful posts. Nothing much happens, over and over again, forever. The real secret life of a generation of Sad not Lad males, dissolutely unable to focus on any clear goals, but unable to relinquish the ghost of ambition, the desire to do something – but what? – else. I must go on, I can’t go on, you know the drill. The tantalizing feeling of waiting for a train that left years ago, of waiting interminably when you know you should have arrived long ago.
Crumbling Loaf is like the interior monologues of the characters in Peep Show , (sample from Friday’s episode, : [Mark wandering around the supermarket] ‘Life is full of pain, desolation, why do we pretend otherwise? [Spots a tin on special offer] Ooooh, look, 33% off…)’ The lurching between a total existential void and the comforting lure of trivia – Crumbling Loaf renders that horribly familiar experience all-too vividly.
Oh for God’s sake.
“I don’t know why they have an illness called depression. That’s just being Lower Middle Class isn’t it?”
The horror of a decent education. The hell of a secure upbringing. The psychic abyss of not suffering from malnutrition or MDR-TB.
Bring back national service.
Hey Daniel, I think you are being a little bit humourless, here (I take it that Sean’s remark was meant in jest). Plus, aren’t you being a bit quick? Are you saying that working class people _don’t_ have a secure upbringing? Or that victims of malnutrition _do_ suffer from depression? Isn’t widespread depression partly a consequence of _not_ having to struggle to survive? (cf Radiohead, who seem to sum up this syndrome of the non-warrior male.)
I was being unfair and also trying to bait – but homourless? The ennui was just getting too much.
I do find the last comment interesting tho. It may be true in part. As more tangible problems recede in importance, the intangible shifts into the foreground.