There Is No Future

How can there be sin?

I love the staff at the bookstore, whom I do not know. The three of them, standing behind two registers, talking through the night shift when hardly anyone wanders in.

They are young and smart and cynical and kind.

I ascribe all manner of freedom to the young staff of the bookstore, the cafe, the diner. Freedom and knowledge.

A sense of what’s next. Where things might evolve. For we were once them, and we knew. We were unformed and feral, eating out of dumpsters, then gathered in the street, forecasting that a war was wrong and would lead to the collapse of Babylon, which it did. We barely knew anything at all, but we knew the truth.

We could see what was next out in the world.

But when it came to ourselves, we looked the other way. We were our own Cassandras. Both the truth tellers and the non-believers. The twin faces of Janus. We refused to believe that anything ever had to change. That we would somehow maintain this clarity of mind forever.

My teenage punk bands wrote songs about our own youth and how we would never relinquish it. How we would do whatever we could to hold on to it.

Our peers did the same. We went on tour with our friend’s band, who sang “hold on to a time/when idiocy had no consequence.” The singer was so frail and charismatic, swinging his guitar wildly and flinging himself about with such grace, then falling to the floor, writhing in the fetal position. It was thrilling. He gave some piece of himself to every show, usually playing to no more than twenty people.

But consequence did come for him.

A heart attack eleven years after that tour.

And I see now that it is all connected. He danced and threw his guitar around like that because he was fighting against a future he saw and wanted to resist.

We thought we could forestall it. We would have these bands and zines and anarchist meetings and stay up all night and fall in love and somehow change our fates. We would celebrate our own scene while it happened, so that it never left us. We would be our own heroes. Fuck anything that came before and anything that was to come. We hated what the corrupt past had wrought, but we also had no hope for the future.

And in that stasis, freedom.

That’s why the lyric “There is no future” from the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen” is so appealing.

That’s why it is the punk lyric.

Because it’s not a threat. Don’t you see? It’s a blessing.

When the chorus repeats “No future for you” over and over again to end the song, it sounds like an incantation. A laying of hands. A prayer.

May you have no future.

Because if there were no future, then we could stay like this forever.

… but try as we might, there was a future.

Everyone handled it differently.

Some didn’t make it.

And some of us struggled mightily. You couldn’t blame us. We were promised no future, and here we all still were. What a scam. We wandered about, doubting ourselves. Was doing what we had always done the best way to honor ourselves? Or was it a violation of the original “new idea” that once compelled us? And thus, was rejecting our past the best way to honor it?

No, that didn’t seem quite right either.

But while some of us worked out how to most gracefully tread this treacherous path, others plodded along with the same confidence they had when they were in the glorious cut of youth. They believed their youthful wisdom to be permanent. That they still knew what was coming. After all, if they instinctively knew what was right back then, why wouldn’t they continue to implicitly know?

They didn’t think they had to do any work to adapt.

And these are the worst of us, is what I mean.

The insufferable.

They give no credit to youth. To culture. To a scene. They give no credit to the force that allowed premonition and insight into the moment. They give no credit to this place of shared ideas that elevated their consciousness.

They thought it was them alone.

And while, occasionally, there is what we call a “genius” who emerges from a particular community and is able to create without youth or a collective consciousness. I think this happens far less often than we toss around the word. And, if you are that genius, enjoy.

But for the rest of us, workers in song, we need to stay close to the collective consciousness, to a place of dynamic ideas, to know what’s next.

To know what we don’t know.

To remember what we forgot.

I do, anyway.

I want to be their friend, is what I mean. The workers at the bookstore. Because they are in the current “no future.” And so they will know best how to navigate it. Not us anymore.

I love visiting the shop at night, when the store is empty and cool. And I love them for being open this late. See, we need somewhere to go at night.

We, the kids of the black hole, all grown up.

That’s what the normal people will never understand. The tourists in alternative culture who spent a few years in the scene, as they would on a semester abroad. They are fine with quiet nights.

They do not fear them.

But I do.