20050710   

Michael considered fate at 17:44   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment

Oi, I don't know how to start this. It's been a long time, I think, since I've written anything here that even sounded like I meant it, let alone anything I really did. It's been a long summer of mild yet empty prosthetizing. A few months of empty breeze coming through the window and sweeping out the back door. Light, airy. Not even strong enough to take anything with it. Here one minute, gone the next.

I'm wondering.. wondering. Doing a lot of wondering, if it means something.. anything? Is this really what being numb is? I really can't say.

I'm not depressed or happy or sad or angry. I'm not upset or pissed off or displeased or elated. I'm not excited or mad, moody or melancholy. I'm just here. I know that, at least, but I still don't know why.

Growing up on the tail end of a giant dragon named The Cold War, the one your daddy killed and is dragged home for supper - as you played on it's scales - leads one to a strange and different place. It's called prosperity and here, in America - though we have had our ups and downs - it is called the American Dream and is published in the very air we breath, a promise and a privelege, nay - a birth right for anyone who steps foot on this great soil. It's the sugar and the gold and everything precious inbetween and we all are welcome to it, have it, take it, need it, use it, flaunt it, show it, breath it.. but. but.. but... we already do. we aleady are. we already have.

We just want more.

It's hard to get anyone to believe it but we are still slaves to our own code, our evolutionary path. You can't get a stock brocker to stop and scrumagge for food in an alleyway dumpster anymore than you can get a bum on the street to stand up and say 'Less Taxes!'. You can't stop a person from being who they are and if you think you can there is a whole lot bigger can of worms around the corner: the people.

We may be advanced, evolutionarily superior, smart, intellectual, but we still overeat. We still strut our feathers in showy-delight like peacocks to their enemies. We still impress eachother with shiny objects of no more innate worth than their very rarity. And all this? - Individually. The collective, the borg as it were, is a whole different can of worms that is so writhing with self-confusion over the ideas that order is impossible, sense a fantasy, and logic a foreign concept.

Sometimes I fear that we are so engrossed in our own little realities in and around us that the bigger picture, the giant painting over our heads goes unnoticed, unattended, and unfinished. Marketing is psychology and pscyhology is just the study of the marketing that goes on inside our very own heads, subconciously, on a daily basis. Success is belief in the product. The product is something we all have nothing of, happiness, which is a fleeting idea at best.

So what are all those grins on everyone's faces that we see on the streets, in the bars, on the stages. This is synthetic goods. Knock offs. Generics. A drug manufactured that is not even 1/10th as powerful as it's naturally grown cousin, but oh so much cheaper. Economies of scale, after all, is a natural phenomenon.

It's easy, very very easy, to shake your head and ignore all this, play the game, move your piece when the dice are handed to you. I do it all of the time. When you are stuck in a game there is only so much time you can spend trying to get out of it. The rest of the time you have to play.

Unfortunately, I often get stuck. I fall into a rythme of trying to think myself out of it, trying to unwrap the gordian note, lay it flat, and if that doesn't work then I work on it with a bit of occam's razor, see-sawing back and forth, back and forth, trying to make progress through the thick rope. It never works. I make no progress. Like a multi-faceted optical illusion I learn new things yet nothing gets me closer to a full understanding. I'm a gazillion licks to the center of this tootsie pop and yet still, there is nothing but a tongue-smoothed surface of hard candy.

So here I am. I have had a crazy and busy summer already and it's not even mid-July. I've been to the west coast, the east coast, down south, and into the carribbean. I've been to the middle of the woods and into the middle of one of the world's largest cities. I'm still numb. Deaf and dumb to the world like I am watching a silent movie - it's familiar, like one I've seen before, but I still don't understand what's happening.

On the movie screen inside my head debutantes march around in a large mansion. There is some sort of dinner party going on. I'm wearing a tuxedo, cut in a 20's style. I don't know where I am, why I am there, or who I might know yet somehow they all seem to know me. I don't think they do. They're all lying. They're just doing a better job of it then me.

Christ they adapt fast. Evolution really is a kicker. Right in the gooser. How'd it work up to me so fast? Already, a lady in a red sparkling evening gown - bleeding bright colors onto the otherwise dull screen, is approaching me with drinks in hand.

"Do sit down, darling," she purrs.

"Um. No. No no, I prefer to stand. Thank you," I say, trying to be pleasant.

"You always were difficult, Michael"

Michael. Michael. Michael. How the hell does she know my name? How do any of them know my name? Fuck you. Fuck you for thinking you can trick me by playing my own game for me. You can't. You can never win.

Then, from a dark balcony somewhere, an owl hoots at me like an old man at a comedy club. He's got a monical. And just like that I am back at my job, sitting in front of a computer, typing a blog post in mid July. It's hot out, a nice sunny Sunday afternoon, and somewhere a couple is lying on the deck of a sailboating sipping margehrita's and making bad Jimmy Buffet jokes. Somewhere, a 14 year old has lied about his age and is working as a line cook in a tourist town making $5 an hour under the table. He'll use some of it to save for college and the rest of it will buy him and his buddies weed for the summer. Out front, a woman - whose boyfriend pretends to dislike her because he is afraid of what will happen if he does - runs back and forth between her wait-station and her customers, frantically filling in checks, refilling after-dinner coffees, and presenting the menus to yet another table. The bartender flirts with her when she goes to make drink orders.

This is the American dream, ripe and plump and ready for the picking. It's practically dripping off the tree, this is humanity in it's Sunday finnest. It's society doing it's best to order up a heaping plate of thank-you-very-much. It's life, screwing up the order.

Wearing my heart on my sleeve - just above the cuff, on the inside - I march around, practically begging to be taken advantage of. It never happens. People - on the rare occassion when you stop to look - are a lot better than most would give them credit for. They don't necessarily mean well but they don't especially intend to screw people over either. We're not measuring the number of boy scouts at busy intersections, here.

It's the harsh collective of being in the borg that really runs people through the wrecker. You know that dream where you're running, and runnning, and running but you don't know why? It's life. Sometimes, I stop, but I always start running again because I don't know where I am and I figure if I keep going maybe I'll end up in a place that I do know. Sometimes I stop for a little bit, and sometimes I stop for longer; just walking alone for awhile.

There is nothing wrong with me. I feel fine. I'm not depressed or happy or sad or angry. I'm not upset or pissed off or displeased or elated. I'm not excited or mad, moody or melancholy. I'm just here.

And that's okay, because I know that I have some work to do and you probably do too. So let's get to it.