this may be true
I woke up from no dreams, exhausted. I woke up and couldn't turn or raise any part of me the millimeter of good faith that would have engaged my semi-autonomic nervous system like a U.S. passport flashed at a checkpoint. I woke up and my only thought was this is the end.

I've never been crazy about Radiohead, and while I was waiting for the water to boil before the heat came on, too emptyheaded to act like an adult and override my autonomic morning rebellion of refusing to wear slippers when it's cold, I realized that the reason is simple, and really has nothing to do with a long procession of other people's friends snorting $10 lines to Kid A, and the nervous embarrassment cut with pathos, the shame at the distance between me and them, slightly overweight, slightly insecure, slightly below-average in some perceived category of being that I've never heard of, boys who should have been girls, in short, cuing up some Radiohead to feel the first blaze of superiority that levels the playing field so that they can talk with confidence about things they know nothing about. It's not about them. It's just that they aren't really about anything, and neither is Radiohead. And things that aren't about anything wear me out, sustaining my end of a conversation that is about having a conversation with me, listening to a song that's about listening to a song, feeling wistful about feeling wistful. Radiohead makes me suicidal, because it forces me to helplessly witness the fact that thousands or millions of people have listened to this music wanting to feel nostalgic. Music that makes you want something (coke, the drug that makes you want more coke; McDonald's, the food that makes you want more food; Camel Lights, the cigarette that makes you want another cigarette...); hey guys, let's do something. This music makes me want to do something. This music that makes you want to want to want something.

Their last album is titled and packaged in a timely and intelligent way. It's called Hail to the Thief; there is a vaguely allusive, vaguely political "collage" on the cover, made up of faux-hand-drawn faux-pieces of paper saying things like "copies" and "oil" and "anti" and "loss" and "fear" and "TV". Sort of like A.N.S.W.E.R., sort of like this boy in my grade who went through several difficult phases on his desperate trajectory away from lifelong nerddom, culminating in the most awkward of all, the sensitive/weight-lifting phase, in which he would announce in an anabolically-enhanced growl in the middle of A.P. English that he had "something to read to the class". This something was inevitably embarrassing, personal, often "poetry" and always patently untrue. Vague allegations of abuse at vague (schoolboard member) parents, made-up emotions raging in a hysteric need for an audience, nothing tarted up as nihilism.

I woke up today and I felt like a Radiohead song, allusive and empty, depressed but more depressing. A signpost on the way nowhere that says "speed up" or "slow down". Possessed by the kind of false consciousness that says things like "what a depressing day" because the lenses on my eyes are gray, or "all I feel like doing is listening to "The Poisoned Well" when really I mean that I have that urge to spy on my own emotions through a cheap diminished seventh peephole, through which everything sounds like a hissing radiator next to a rain-blurred window and we all are the same. God forbid I looked at myself head-on, like Medusa in the mirror; we know where that takes us, a place where the lighting is bad and the drugs are about exhibitionism; a place antithetical to our voyeur's needs, our control-freak needs, our need to tell the truth with lies and lies with the truth.

Or the need to get angry at some innocuous late-capitalist bystander, always a straw man, a Radiohead, a goyisha scapegoat, a jackass remark to have the last word, anything rather than admitting that you drew the short straw, the E.Q. shortbus, the protoalzheimer's path to a lifetime of making up preferences for nice round tables at restaurants, designer clothes and books you would never actually read, a lifetime of fighting to stop fighting, of living for retirement, of next-best decisions as long as no one finds out who you really are and at least a few important people think you're important too. A lifetime of editing your epitaph to make sure that it's really really you they put in the ground. Mine will say nunc stans, to make sure I'm really dead; and to make sure the present ends presently, it will all be burned on the raft, my goyisha funeral, like a viking on the East River, violating zoning laws for cremation and probably for smoking as well.

At least I never lied.