Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per se.

I'm screaming for help and everybody's acting as if I'm singing Ethel Merman covers.

Entertainment provides relief. Art provokes engagement.

How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.

Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude - but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense.

What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves. They've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.

That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we're all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine.