The hardest thing about being good is remembering.
You know how easy it is to just walk into the city and someone’ll smell your inner scum and offer you the best drugs you’ve ever had in your life.
You know you can lie to somebody to get down their pants.
You know you can beat someone’s face in and it flushes your misery away.
You have to walk around all day NOT-drinking and trying to be a good citizen and saving your money and not smashing people in the head when they’re being absolutely fucking disrespectful to you, just because they’ve triggered themselves on their own pathetic existence. It’s hard.
Coz it’s so easy to be bad.
But what makes person worthy of admiration, is achievement. Delayed gratification, foresight, drive and success, status and unbridled fucking kindness in the face of a sea of fucking assholes.
The love and respect I have for several of the women in my life is for their decision to be ultimately kind. I see enough fire and strength in them to see that they could choose to be a nasty, sour bitch and rain hell upon their critics but the conclusion that they eventually reached was to be ultimately kind, occasionally putting their foot down when their boundaries are threatened.
I will always have more respect for the decision to be good and I’m sorry to people that feel compelled to defend their drinking or their diet or the way they treat their partner.
I don’t HAVE to respect bad behaviour: and I won’t.
Justify it all you like. It’s your business and you don’t have to explain yourself to anyone. I am simply saying that I respect when people TRY to be good.
There’s a sea of blokes out there running their businesses, smiling politely at people who break their balls, raising their kids to be acceptable humans: Who were fucking scumbags 20 years ago.
These are the kinds of guys that’d smash your face into the pavement if it meant that they maintained the respect of their peers, but the same guy’d give you his last dollar to get yourself home.
These guys get up and shave and put their pants on and keep promises to the people they love, they do it hard and they try to save their money and they never really get ahead because the system isn’t designed for people to get ahead.
And they KNOW that at any time of any day, they could get a bag of cocaine, or a handful of hammer or a bottle and a pack of cigarettes and all their troubles would just melt away. And they just fucking keep it together. And I admire that.
I know girls who did every drug under the sun and unashamedly fucked whoever they wanted. Punched other chicks right in the mouth and stole whatever they could to get high.
These women raise their kids the way that they should’ve been raised themselves and when their daughter turns around and asks them about sex they’ll have ALL the fucking answers. Because they fucking lived.
Because they walked on the wild side.
And it’s always still there, always waiting for you.
It’s so easy to hit someone in the face and take whatever you need.
But you learn to get what you need in other ways.
It’s so easy to commit crimes and get fast money. But you learn to be patient, to pace your spending, to plan ahead, to choose carefully.
It’s easy to wittle your life down to single cause, a single meaning: to get high.
It’s hard to have a billion little things that all need taking care of to equate to the same state of happy or contentedness.
Being good is only difficult when you remember how much more fun it was to be bad. And you remember every day.
You remember how much easier it was to be living the fucking nightmare.
And you wish you could forget but the methods that you used for forgetting aren’t on the menu anymore.
ARCHANGEL: Notorious 