To an unnamed kid...

Dear kid, this life is nothing but a freaking test. If you ask me, your mistakes are your test papers, and you're your own bloody tutor. So it's up to you to learn by experiencing the consequences of your mistakes, but especially the mistakes of others, or blind your own eyes pretending not to realise that failure is painful.

Being an enthusiast or fan of those useless adults that have given their lives to that wilful and intractable deviation from decent conduct will only lead you astray. But you wouldn't know it until you grow old and start to be sorry about the opportunities you've lost, or the shameful things you did.

Truth is, as a kid, there's this weird desire to be like that neighbourhood gangsta that goes about marketing his ways, or that violence-prone junkie who has had run-ins with the police. But like Satan's ways to mislead humankind into sin, these wasted adults are just deceiving you by telling you lies or otherwise giving a false impression of their regretful lives. If you're foolish enough to buy it, know that you're buying nothing but poison.

Sincere ones like myself will warn you, but the majority are only looking for partners, so they wouldn't wallow alone in failure. I'm saying this because I have personally done things that I'm not proud of, and you may not be too lucky a survivor like me. So to be honest, after conducting a personal inventory of the things I did as a kid, and the consequences thereof, I can confirm that life is too damn short to be wasted, and that there's absolutely no gain in waywardness.

In fact the truth about that type of life is that you may think people are laughing with you when they're laughing at you. You may think people are afraid of you when they're only avoiding you. So be a wise kid. Refrain from being an afterthinker and be a forethinker, it'll take you places.

Failure to take heed is like someone had his feet lodged in the quicksand, and by God he struggled not to sink into it. Now he's telling you "bro don't take that path, there's a quicksand ahead," but you stubbornly want to confirm firsthand. How foolish of you. 🙉