I'm an artist, or an aspiring one at least, and what I love and hate the most is those moments when I'm ragingly drunk and in love with humanity, and all of a sudden I feel I've tapped into the zeitgeist. I'll be looking at some flotsam TikTok account of some Mexican and I'll notice something about the way she holds her phone for the selfie, that pristine thing, or the way her friends crowd in for the photo, all of them pretending spontaneity, and suddenly I 'get' it. I have the same revelation Andy Warhol had as he conceptualized Pop Art: "I'm living in the future."

What else could it be when I'm hunched over a borrowed laptop with an X Box controller practicing Street Fighter, holding forward and then backwards and then punch l so I can make Chun Li do that stupid combo or whatever it is that will defeat Guille? What Else could it be when I get pulled away from the general scrum of someone's overcrowded dorm room because someone noticed I was bouncing around making hopeless small talk, and he wanted me out for a smoke break (even though I didn't smoke (except weed)) so that he could tell me about all the drugs he'd tried, and his family's history of mental illness, which meant he'd been put on ADHD stimulants and sleeping pills because people thought he'd go crazy when he started smoking weed or something, cause his sister did?

What else could it be when I think the 20th Century was a write-off and the most important thing that ever happened simultaneously, characterized by VHS tape and Hitler and Blur and the final triumph of Capitalism, when musicians who did drugs and made popular music considered themselves the chiefs of Communism?

What else could it be when I think every VHS tape should be destroyed and every Super 8 immolated, so that people can take videos on their phone, and see reality as it really is (while avoiding people with tattoos and nose rings) and come to terms with the fact that we're living in the 21st Century?

And of course the soundtrack to these thoughts is some forgotten B-side from the 90s, when I should be doing something more important, like playing pool.