A.N: Wrote this for an English assignment - write a Holden-inspired piece about our modern society. It doesn't deal directly with anyone in the original book and the only mention of Holden is right here, so if you came for an elaboration on Holden's psyche, well, this ain't the fic for you. If you want something light-hearted and fluffy, again, not for you. If you want to read something that may or may not leave you with a sick taste in the back of your throat, then this is the fic for you.

Holden despises phonies. I hate phonies.

Define: Phonies.
sing. form: phony.
n. a person who acts falsely and contrary to their own beliefs. A traitor to oneself.
You are such a goddamn phony.

This is your life.

You wake up with your bedmates, the cockroaches, scampering around between the sheets of your motel bed. The ceiling is stained the color of piss, smoke, and dirt. The lone light bulb is bare, nakedly shining its light despite the interference of the thick, opaque glass. Cracks run from the baseboards up to the disgusting ceiling, spider webs of broken walls and spider webs of dust in the corners.

You get out of bed and put on the same rumpled clothes as you did the day before. Your cotton filled head pounds and your sleepy muscles protest any sort of movement but you splash cold water on your face and gulp down three mugs of viscous coffee and suddenly you're moving.

You fight through traffic for the next hour and you stare blearily ahead of you at the sea of crimson lights and you do your best to ignore the honking that grates on your nerves like so many goddamn demonic geese.

Your boss labels a pile of papers as yours and yours alone to complete. He gives you until this afternoon and the stack is forty pages high and you need to complete it in triplicate, so you gulp down another three mugs of coffee and get to work.

This is your life.

You pretend not to hear when your phone rings. You pretend that someone other than your mother is calling, pretend that it is an unwelcome solicitor and not the woman who raised you with all her best intentions.

You pretend that your dislike is fully rational.

You let it ring, let it ring, let it ring, until at last she gives up.

As the phone quiets, as your cubicle descends once more into degenerate silence, you give up, giving a little bit more of your sanity to the glowing technological god you call a computer.

You crawl closer to the finish line as the horizon slowly drags the gasping sun under, drowning the warm, orange glow with the dirty man-made skyscrapers that jab at the sky like fingers prodding and bruising tender flesh.

You stumble out of the corporate building, your corporeal form weak and insignificant when juxtaposed with the bustling patchwork of manufactured achievement and progress.

You do not return home, if you can even call that disgusting, dilapidated motel room home.

Diving headlong into the filth of the seedy underbelly of the progressive city, you shamble alongside your fellow zombies, those left behind to rot as the rest of the world blazed their own trail, and saddle up to the bar and place your hands on the grimy counter top, too accustomed to rot and disrepair to keep up any pretense of superiority.

This is your goddamn life.

This is your life, crumbling and decaying, as you poison your liver and burn your throat, tossing back shot after shot.

This is your bar, where you spend the darkest hours of the night, pressed on all sides by drunks and sluts, reveling in the close contact, in the heterogeneous mixture that swirls around you but does not engulf you without your prior consent. This is why you love this shit-hole so much.

You drink to forget and in doing so give your consent.

Hating yourself and attempting to destroy your ill-fitting meat suit, bemoaning silently your pathetic existence, you dissolve into the pattern and pace of the city's pit-stain and, relieved and utterly willing, give up your consciousness to cheap booze, cigarette smog, muted lighting.

Staggering back into the night, the frigid air uncaring of its role in undoing your meticulously fabricated alcoholic fog, you return, finally, as the faintest signs of a sunrise smear themselves across the starry landscape.

Peeling layers of sweat-drenched fabric off your flesh, you sink under the itchy covers and shiver.

THIS IS YOUR GODDAMN LIFE.

This is your life, and you refuse to face it, because you hate to admit to your ultimate failing. Four years ago, fresh-faced and painfully optimistic, you let yourself sway from your dream, forgoing the necessary education to follow it, in favor of a lucrative, stable career.

You've resigned yourself to this life, no matter how much you hate it, because you know your every opportunity has passed.

You hurtle through life, dashing madly towards the finish-line, apathetic to the world blurring in your peripheral vision, and hope to stumble upon a fork in the road, any deviation, to guide you away from your current cyclical path of self-loathing and self-destruction.

How often must I repeat myself? This is your life. There is nothing at this point you can hope to accomplish. You are pathetic, a worm squirming on the sea of concrete, stranded after being washed ashore by a furious rainstorm, who refused to move while moisture remained in the flesh, while movement was still a possibility. You wanted to stick your hand in the pool of disgrace at the world's feet and prove it wasn't that bad, that you could handle life and its goddamn madness, but you drowned in it. What more can I do? I have thrown your way opportunity after opportunity to allow you to rectify your course, to divert your break-neck pace, and you remained steadfast, your focus unwavering, even as all hopes disappeared one by one, just as your night's glimmering stars faded, plunging your world in depressing darkness.

You beg me now, hopeless, yet while you had all the tools at your disposal you turned my peace-offering aside with the intentions of returning for them later. Even after several attempts with the same result – you'd return to find the chance gone, stolen away by someone with more insight and motivation than you – you continued to throw your chances out the window in favor of something called the American Dream, the capitalistic dream, instead of your dream.

So forgive me when I will only sit back at this point and say, "This is your life" and refuse to waste my energy on a goddamn hopeless fool like yourself.