Disconnected.

Few people break out of this town, this dead, crippled city, and when they do, they come back only to find they're hated by the ones who are still trapped here. I see people everyday kidding themselves of happiness but when you make the effort to search a little deeper you find they've long given up. It's just about keeping appearances, you think you're the only one with your dark secrets, forbidden habits and multitude of facades - no, you're wrong. Everyone is the same. Everybody has ceased to care. It's just watching the arms on the clocks go by, counting every second, waiting for the hammer to drop.

You kid yourself when you're younger that it's all great, life will always be this wonderful, you'll grow up together and never change, but it's just another self-reasoned delusion. People get bored of each other, they get bored of themselves, so they seek the next objective. The next big step in life to ward of boredom and self-inflicted unhappiness. Get married, they say, a wife will keep you on check, your husband will make the burden easier, you can create a happy union and live your lives happily ever after. Until he beats the shit out of you for flirting with his best friend. Until she leaves you because you're washed up and can't get a job. Until you're kids grow up too fast, leaving you impossible tasks, look at you with resentment, and spit in your face for your years of servitude and love. That's just how it works these days. We've created this machine, and now we're living inside it.

So it's all about escapism. Your televisions, iPods, phones, computers, games, raunchy novels and fashion magazines and all that bullshit about the untold joys of a fucking celebrity lifestyle. That becomes your objective, because they feed it to you from an early age. Masses of advertisements and media avarice crammed right into your tiny, thick little skull, until that's what your whole life becomes about. It's no longer about living a good, honest, simple life of devotion - these are the dreams of fools, of unambitious peasants trapped in the fields of the past, slaving away like mindless drones for an absentee landlord that has long ceased to care for them.

No, we're different, we're chasing the dream, we're turning our backs on the ideals of our forefathers and pursuing a better, more entertaining life. We'll wear the best clothes (never twice), drive the fanciest cars, replace our childhood memories with the shared memories the idiot box feeds us, we'll listen to all this fucking bullshit music that was never any good and full of their propaganda shit. We'll replace those who should be our heroes with a bunch of empty-shell millionaires who see us as nothing but mindless consumers. The lines of reality and fantasy will become blurred. Everything will become blurred. Men will become women and women will become men. The hungry, oppressed, abused will cease to exist in the world because they no longer exist in our minds, except when some great news-worthy tragedy occurs, in which case we'll all temporarily unite to show our false faces and show we're still connected. We'll update our fucking blogs, Twitter and Facebook with messages of our compassion and sympathy, we'll offer prays but we've long let go of any notion of God, and then we'll go back to watching Celebrity Big Brother.

Ultimately it's all about escapism, nothing beyond that. Anything to take our minds of the severity of our situation, anything that delays the rising tides of reality destroying our shores. We're all just a bunch of drooling, vacant, addicts in a vegetative state, hooked up to a life-support machine with an infinite supply of self-administered morphine. Existing, but not living.