All My Heroes are Assholes

A friend of mine recently told me she felt like she had finally found her people.  I knew just what she meant.  She was referring to a group of friends we have in common.

"Intellectual degenerates" she called them, or I did, or maybe it was intelligent degenerates.  I don't remember specifically who or what.  I was drunk.  It's the general idea that's important.  

The truth is most intellectuals I have ever met have been degenerates.  That's what I love most about them.  Most intellectual people I have ever read about have been degenerates.  And smart people always suffer from mental illness, or what appears to be mental illness to the masses.  Everyone seems to know this, and yet, we are somehow always surprised to learn it.  

It seems like I have always known, since I was very young, that most of the good people in the world, your teachers, police officers, clergy, politicians, have all been assholes and hypocrites.  That's the reason I have always had a "problem with authority."  Because I have always known this.  I still know it now.  Kids like Holden Caufield call them phonies.  He knew.  And we love him for it.  We don't even realize it's probably us he is complaining about.  And even at the end of that novel, we rarely understand that he will grow up to become us.  

I first found my people in San Antonio, roughly a decade ago, when I was close to her age.  That's why I know exactly what she means.  And now, years later, I seem to have assembled a very similar set in Sacramento.  Or maybe they found me.  

There's little magic in the world for us.  We are cynics and skeptics.  We drink and carry on.  We disassemble social systems.  We construct incredible alternatives.  We burn those down.  We do it again.  

We turn Gods into men, which is the worst thing you can do to a God. 

We've been around forever.  

We always have the most fun.

Poor Holden couldn't even have heroes.  All my heroes are assholes.