leaving the gold in the hills

I want to see the shitty wonderful.

I just want everything to be shitty and wonderful, like it is.

It’s so easy to find, in the world, the shitty. Just look at all this crap around you. Badly run, cruelly done, lying, greedy, cheesy, measly, hard done, selfish, stupid fucking shit.

But wonderful is just as easy. It’s not just the nearest tree you can find, wonderful!, but look at your heart, listen to this song, can you smell the Summer, taste this berry, feel this breeze late at night? Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.

But oh the shitty wonderful, where is that? That’s where the trouble happens. That’s the glorious reckoning. I need some shitty wonderful RIGHT NOW.

Stolen and free. Generous frugality. Sloppy, lazy genius. Unmarketable unfashionable ugly loveliness. Failure failure failure shining with the inner light of success.

I was driving home from my almost shitty wonderful job. I was looking for something on the radio.

Then I found it. 

Racist Sexist Boy by the Linda Lindas.

This is shitty wonderful, I thought.

Shitty wonderful, shitty wonderful, shitty wonderful. It was some 10 to 16 year old girls in Los Angeles doing a punk song in the L.A. Library. It was a little terrible and really great. Shitty wonderful.

Maybe it was already too wonderful.

I never understood those too cool people who only liked the great new thing before everyone else found it, and it became popular, at which point they turned their back on it. But maybe it’s this. Maybe they just want the shitty wonderful. 

I looked up the Linda Linda’s and, while I still admire the young people’s spirit, and their song, finding out that their parents are all deeply connected, influential figures in the arts and culture, and that the Linda Lindas have just been on Jimmy Kimmel brought me down. 

Wonderful, yes. 

Shitty, yes. 

But the shitty wonderful was slipping through my fingers.

Who, you ask, wouldn’t want to clean the shit off of wonderful?

But there is a terrible balance to the world. 

There is the horrible law of equilibrium. 

And it says for every time you clean the shit off of wonderful someone, somewhere will snuff the wonderful out of the shit.