This hollowness will have to be filled with drugs, at least for some period of time, or I will not have covered my bases and demonstrated my bona fides. I will know what bona fides means and use it the autobiography I will half ghost write, but I will not know that it is not pronounced as it would immediately appear it is to a native English speaker. I will marry, or at least seriously date, an actress of middling talent and without good prospects for long-term career longevity. It will not, of course, last, but this will again help set expectations low for the parties I am to defyexpectations at. After the implosion of this one very public relationship, I will learn me lesson, and begin to shape up. This is the important part, you see, the pseudo redemption, where I will learn to be merely contented by my millions, the balm of occasional bits of earnest but under-motivated philanthropy and many fine meals soothing my licentious nature and causing my figure to wax unpoetically, my psyche kept safe from the buffeting of aging not by the wild excess of a stadium tour, but by the mundane immoderacy of half-timbered English country homes and golf outings in tropical locales, with only the occasional sprinkling of infidelity and cocaine to remind me of my previous life as a different kind of archetypal twat.
Over champagne flutes tilted back and emptied slightly faster than the average for the room, I will give captains of industry a name to drop and get myself an invitation to a Premier League football match. During the game I will leave the luxury box several times to walk around on the concourse level and gauge my current level of celebrity by recording (in my head, a talent that will develop with age and success) how many sets of eyes, broken down by age and gender, stay fixed on me just a little too long. I will return several of these gazes, mostly younger women, and will be asked to sign autographs, which I will do happily, as well as pose for photos, and will enjoy the feeling of an unconfidently-placed hand placed upon the back of my vintage leather motorcycle jacket, the hesitancy of the general public one of the last pools of humanistic behavior I can draw from.
Of course I will be deeply unhappy, for my book would be terrible otherwise, and the book tour is how you get back in the saddle. It gets you on television, where you are allowed to say silly, self-aggrandizing things without consequence. I will talk of my struggle with drugs, and my defunct relationships, and the minutiae of the moments surrounding the penning of my most famous songs, which will all be a load of rubbish, as most of my songs will have been written by producers and other musicians hired to maintain the momentum of my career. I will tell talk show personalities that I am doing great in a way that will invite speculation as to my sincerity, and I will transmit these pathos through the glances I shoot over my champagne flute to the other guests of the party, so they can go home and tell their friends, delicately, as if perhaps they should not betray my trust, that even if they could switch places with me... well, maybe for a day... I will be at my home by then, where I can spend just as much time as they do thinking about whether or not I should switch out the brand of soap I keep in the shower and put off calling someone, even my assistant, about putting in new gutters.
I will collect antique cars, which one of my children, conceived in order to save an ultimately doomed relationship, will destroy at least one of in a collision involving banned intoxicants, a member of the opposite sex and a feeling of gross entitlement. I will use the facts of this collision as a point of commonality with my rich friends not in the music industry. We will discuss our parental foibles, all of us simultaneously wishing we could talk about something more interesting, like sex, or politics, or things we would like to buy.
Needless to say, I will be terribly bored, always.
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