My Life is Like a Half-Strung Guitar

"Hip", wrote Norman Mailer, "is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle...
If the fate of twentieth century man is to live with death from adolescence to premature senescence, why then the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self."

So where does that leave me, with my half-strung life that could, given the time and attention it demands, someday produce perfect harmonies and righteously climactic riffs, if only I can manage to stick it out through the stringing and the tuning and all that. Progressively more social with each growing day, I sometimes even find myself smiling at random people and being (heaven forbid!) 'civil' to my flatmates! Oh Mr. Mailer, why do you tease me so... just when I don't need to hear that I had it but I lost it, like a french schoolmarm you rap me sharply across the knuckles for being polite! Oh, woe is me, like it weren't tough enough already to fight against my natural instincts to just stare through people and hope they'd disappear; to break down the walls of the bell jar in which I seem to spend my time, so that people's voices intrude eerily, floating in vaguely from a distance, incomprehensible till I actually register their presence, and lift the glass edge a little to try and understand. O! And yes, darlings, this is perhaps as long as my brief flirtation with 'normal' was meant to last - no more 'happy' or 'optimistic' or 'the sun always shines on tv' for me. No wait, I think I'll take that last one.

Anyways, despair is never too permanent, and there isn't just one authority on anything. Definers and definitions abound (it is what we've now been doing for forty thousand years after all):

" But really, hip is hip, enduring through all permutations. Anyone who leaves the house with bed head has an idea of where its light shines." - John Leland

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the defence rests.