the difference between good fucked up and bad fucked up

She stands outside in her baggy cardigan, flicking the end of her cigarette stub with her thumb so that ash disperses over the concrete between her Chucks. I know for a fact that on Monday nights she routinely gets high and stinks the bathroom out with the sweet-sour smell of burning spliff. Her ex-boyfriend threatens to smack up her current one, and her lacy black underwear has holes in the seams.

Inside her head her brain is set to ‘shuffle’. Secrets come out if you give her a shake; you can increase the volume with a soft pressing and stop ideas abruptly with the pause button. She doesn’t know it but she is more intelligent than an alchemist. She can make colours appear with a puff of smoke from her lungs and digests chemicals more willingly than any solvent.

He is the same but different. On K Road he meets a man higher up in the corporate chain than himself and they exchange goods: one receives cash, the other receives drugs. He’s allowed to smoke dope but not inside the house becuase his girlfriend doesn’t like that. He comes to class with yellow-grey semicircles haunting the skin under his eyes and I wonder sometimes if he ever sleeps.

The thoughts which he owns are existing outside his head. But is it the drugs or his mind? He’s completely blasé to the world around him; he lives in his own right, a mad scientist, an artist, a culprit.

Another sneaked wine in garden sheds at 11. The candy she likes comes in pretty colours which reflect themselves in the corners of her head. She knows what it’s like to be smacked around. She had a love affair with cigarettes too, this other, and saw things that affected her for life. They’re fucked up, these three, bad.

I wonder how I could ever be so creative without being so fucked up. I don’t even dare to pry into this world for fear that the things I encounter might rupture my corneas, or burst my eardrums, cauterise my fingertips. I don’t want the bitter aftertaste of crime clinging onto my taste buds or the stench of guilt burrowing into my nostrils. I keep away from these things. I banish creativity. I can’t understand shit.

Call yourself an artist, myself goads myself.

But I realise on Fridays: I’m good fucked up. That’s why my curse follows me around. Being bad would block my creative resources and then I’d just be fucked up, full stop.

I’m good fucked up: Tainted by respectability. Molested by chastity. Damaged by virtue. Punished by obedience. Poisoned by sobriety. Infected by sanitation. Crippled by sanity. Defunct by punctuality. Hindered by determination. Dulled by intelligence. Burdened by morals. Slurred by elocution. Good fucked up. So good it’s fucked up. Being good fucks me over.

That’s the difference between me and them. But we are all artists, and dance our fucked up dances. That’s what makes us so brilliant.