Dear My Fellow Americans,
It's somewhere just after dawn. I couldn't tell you exactly when because I have no use for clocks at this hour and it's largely irrelevant anyway. This letter has been three years in the works and has taken on at least six different drafts. Each one barely makes it past the declaration that it is, in fact, written for all of us. There are reasons for this aplenty mind you — and not least of which is that counting myself among you is a bile inducing thought. However, as our monuments and parks sit in a state of rot, if not entirely cared for out of passion for preservation and the outside world, I feel I am out of time. So, here I am, just after dawn, swallowing down the sick feeling to put words down on a page. It's the only recourse left, the only hope for a shark who finds too much trash in the waves, and I must write or I will drown in this tsunami of garbage that has become the America I once knew.
I used to ask myself where we went wrong. Was it the mongrel dogs in Washington, the crooked, cut rate, dime store, bullshit artists whose only real talent is whipping the masses into a frenzy in ways that would make a pasty chef blush? Was it the way that we've really run with the age old adage that There's no such thing as bad press? Is it the, tail chasing, maelstrom of madness that is materialism and the idea that the metric of success is having a bigger T.V than the neighbors you can only see when peeking through bent Venetian blinds? Is it because we've lost sight of the forest and can only see the trees? Is it because we've become upright beasts and treat the social hierarchy like it's some representational food chain? Is it because we've started living in echo chambers, rejecting things we don't like in the blind pursuit of confirmation bias until we're akin to something like the main character in Altered States?
If not for the few high spots I've been able to find while surfing this wave of syringes and feces, these are the kind of thoughts that would keep me up at night. If not for good (according to me), Kentucky, bourbon, strong coffee, and the ripping back of the curtain on digestible drugs, I might not have never noticed these things — and for that I used to wonder if my life might have been better. The ignorant sure smile more, at least when they're not too busy looking like red-faced Howler Monkeys. I learned, perhaps too quickly however, that this, like a life designed to be lived in these Godless hours of threadbare functionality, was not for me.
Better to live with eyes open, even if what you're seeing sometimes feels like a waking nightmare, a fever dream fueled by too much cactus and tequila.
Perhaps that's a bit of where this edge comes from, as it is a thing I have very recently gone over. Reciting correspondence to the vestiges of hope I see, few as they are, has littered the landscape of my thoughts with words that have a fierce demand to make their way out. They, like the democracy we cling to through our perverted lens, are at the core of what keeps me going as grey skies struggle to find some kind of color. Perhaps it is loud music, the fuel in the tank and the driving thrum in my ears that keeps my feet moving. Perhaps it's the fact that I didn't spike either of the three cups of coffee I've had and made this mistake of watching what passes for news this morning. Perhaps it's because I'm stuck in a house that's too big, in a place where prohibition runs rampant and the laws concerning alcohol echo the fact that not even the streets here can come before God...
The truth is, my fellow dogs, it's because even the fleas are starting to jump ship to avoid all the mange.
Calling what we have now any kind of Democracy is akin to saying we have any kind of sexual education that isn't mired in some Puritanical fear of what we get up to after dark. Calling what passes for Love of Country is not too different than the Sunday, Church skipping, Christians who call for the murder and shame of people who just want to live their lives. Calling what we have as a collective 'common sense' is the same kind of misnomer as suggesting Michigan has clean water — and it's no wonder that place is leading the way toward the Fury Road future as a result. The problem is that we say all these things like they're somehow true just because we say them and, heartbreaking as it is to pen these words or transcribe them onto this blog that stands as a testament to my good fortune, I just can't live inside that bubble anymore.
We're a nation run by upright swine and jackals, con men and swindlers who think that civil service is a cause worthy of jockeying. We're a collective of people who think the world is a giant versus sport, that the size of a car and how many you have is some measure of success and God help anyone who has more who paints a target on themselves by having more than you. Discomfort, whether rooted in envy or not, has become grounds for Murder. Unease has become the plague of the unquiet mind, where the man who lives better must be bludgeoned because he highlights all the things that we do not have. It's akin to the insanity of murdering a Michelin star chef because the only things you've ever bothered to learn to cook come from a microwave — and nobody even stops to think this is anything short of normal.
So where did we go wrong? I'd like to think there's a root or a cause because that means that there's some kind of cure. I'd like to think we can carve it out like cancer and flush it with enough poison. Believe me, I've tried. It doesn't work. The problem isn't a physical root, it's not something we can simply deforest with a legion of saws.
Don't get me wrong, my fellow famished, there's a lot of good in the world still out there. There's truth. There's justice. There's passion. I've seen these things. I've touched them. I carry them with me. I've sat down with them around the fire and kept warm with the company of conversation. I've found them at the bottom of coffee cups, even at this hour. I've espoused their virtues from the tops of tall mountains, I've brought people with me to the top and let them go so they could fly. I've seen the beauty in the mud, the wind, and the rain. I've heard symphonies comprised of gunfire and high grade pyrotechnics that would soil the sheets of even the most devout of arsonists. I have seen and known the joy that can only come with knowing you're sharing a twilight sky with all the promise that could ever be. I've known good music, good people, and feasted on amazing meals...
And when I look around now, I'm just as hungry for more as the rest of you.
I want to know the great mysteries. I want to see the future on the other side of the horizon. I want us to go to the stars we know and be more than the petty measurements we all use to gauge success. I want these things the same as I write these words. I chase them down with the same abandon because my bones no other form of motion. It's what's right for me and, despite it being a pursuit most destined to end in feeling rich in spite of poverty, that's the entire point of my life. It's the root of my pleasure, the fuel for my passion, and the roads by which I have found myself stumbling into the what was once thought to be the most impossible of treasures. It's what works for me, the same as, I'd hope, you've found a life that works for you.
It's imperative however that that's as far as it goes, right there. It's for you. That's it. You don't get to make those decisions for anyone else. Freedom, at least according to the founding articles of the American Way, is supposed to be inalienable and truth held self-evident. That means you can't impose your will upon another and call it right, because then that person isn't free. You can't steal what is not yours, however envious you might be of the things you want. You're not entitled to anything just because you're here, breathing and taking up space. Whatever you want out of life, you've got to barter for it with the currency you've cultivated — and I strongly advocate a sense of reflection if money is the only measurement you've learned to use there.
So then it seems to me the fault is more simple than I would like: The problem is us. The problem is that Representational Democracy is all too real. I don't have — nor necessarily think there should be — an alternative. So what then should we do when our national monuments are littered in our own trash? What do we do when the highest court in the land has seen the appointment of soulless, greedy, screw-jacks who couldn't be trusted with a single person, never mind a decision that would impact more of then than we could ever hope to know in a lifetime? What then, do we do, when half the voting public sees no point and the franchise of America is cluttered with the disenfranchised? How do we go forward when even the Captain hates the fucking boat and just wants to slap down the Hammer and Sickle sponsorship stickers on the bow?
Fuck me. I'd never say I know, but I can tell you what I think: We've got to be better than we've found ourselves.
Your life isn't about the size of the T.V. or how many cars you own. It's not about if you buy a home, have a kid, or leave any kind of legacy. These are the fruits that ripen too quickly and rot before the harvest. These goals are cheap. They're easy and they undercut the value of even the most blustery New England sunrise (limited as even I'll admit I find it). Life's about what you do and what you leave behind when you're gone. If all that remains of you is a house full of shit or a snapshot in a history book? You've got no control over what people are going to do with that. None. No more than I do with these words — and believe me I intimately understand the woes that come with that kind of thinking.
Maybe I've got it all wrong. Certainly I wouldn't advocate what I call living for most of the world at large. It has almost killed me more than once and, again, it certainly drives me down a road of poverty and lunacy. That's just it though, it's mine. I'd rather see the iconic moths flying from the mouth of my wallet than have the words of a stranger come spilling from my lips. I'd rather know good food I made and share it than I would buy it to keep it for myself. I like smoking cigarettes and drinking at socially unacceptable hours of the day. I am ill suited to the nine-to-five rat-race — if only because I have no interest in keeping up with the rest of you. I don't even like you. In fact, I find most of you insane if not downright contemptible in your conduct and lacking self knowledge...but there's a catch to those words.
I don't have to agree with you.
I have to stay in my lane. I have to barrel down on the gas pedal. I have to write words to keep myself swimming because that's what sharks do. I have to prepare feasts of plenty and serve them on the fine china of my heart. I have to make my choices for me because I have to live up to my own standards, because I have to respect myself in these cold and bitter mornings, because if I didn't I wouldn't be me and if I wasn't me then who the fuck is living my life? My self is not a commodity and neither is yours. It's not for anyone else to buy and it's not for you to try and sell. It's not for you to say is right and, so long as you're not imposing and demanding your way be the way for anyone else, it's not for anyone else to say is wrong either.
Life is not a spectator sport. It's not an arena where everything has to be a fight or a trench populated only by the men, women, and others who agree with you. It's not a war that must be waged on holidays or your fragile sense of security. It's not an assault on your existence because people don't behave in a manner in which you agree with even if you're worried for the state of their immortal souls. Someone's faith and ideas aren't wrong because they're not the same as yours, the same as I'm not right just because I write these words down. Again, my life has almost killed me. It stalks me through the shadows, it has sent me to bed cold, tired, and hungry, and I accept these choices. Even when I believed I would die alone save the company of a much more literal — and thus more tolerable — breed of dog, I accepted this without hesitation. I had no choice because, again, this life is mine and I had to be me.
It's no different for you or anyone else. Maybe you're the kind of person who likes to get up, cinch up your Windsor knot over the ivory buttons after lacing up your Oxfords, and go to work negotiating land deals on behalf of people who barely speak your language. Maybe you're the kind of soul who struggles through the dawn to put passion into the food you want to feed the world. Maybe you spend your Sunday's in service to your — and I do mean your — God. Maybe you do think the measure of success is how many placeholders you put in front of the decimal point in your bank account. I can worry about you for any one of these things. I can be concerned about the quality of life you're living. I can think you're absolutely insane to go about it the way you do...
But what I can't do is tell you how to live and you can't do that to anyone either. It's repugnant to have to add the caveat that this thinking isn't really relevant to the rapists, pederasts, and other such rabid beasts, who think they've the right to forcibly alter the course of someone's will — but these are the times we live in. Nobody gets a blank check on to bounce on bullshit anymore. Racism never was funny. Mockery of the lives lost won't carry you far at all, if only because you're missing the point of the tragedy and in so doing, you're betraying the same sense of America you claim so proudly under you ball-caps while chomping down on hot dogs and root-root-rooting for your home team thinkers. We're all the same snowflakes, special until we melt because we let ourselves get so hot under the collar at the things we don't agree with in the world.
Again, don't get me wrong. I get it. There's so many people — and I use the word generously here — in the world that go about in ways I vehemently disagree with, but I'll give you room to go about your life, to let you "do you". I'll keep my scathing words lashed firmly behind my teeth unless you invite them in by loosing yours on the world as if you've any kind of real authority over the lives of anyone else. I want you to be happy. I want you to have what you want, but the world is not the oyster for you to shuck and the fishermen who finds the pearl is not yours to murder just because you want it for yourself or don't think he should have it when you're struggling so. I cannot, in good conscience, tell you what is right unless you ask. I cannot, in good standing of the self, advocate the life I've lived unless you knock on the door and ask for that kind of guidance. I cannot, no matter how right I think I am in the way I live — and I very much do — impose that kind of life on you.
Buying into the idea that you're right for anyone other than you? That's chasing your tail trying to make your way. That's perverting your memory, which is the only lasting form of legacy. It doesn't matter how many marks you make in concrete or how much soil you turn up to make way for your own expansion. It's not Dog Eat Dog, it's Caveat Emptor. It's buyer beware, especially of your own shit sandwich. It's making sure you're satisfied with what you see reflected back in the mirror and understanding it's in that glass you'll find the only things you've got any right to have a say in at all.
Again, I'm not saying you can't go mad, get frothing, or get frustrated at the direction the dirt ball seems to be spinning. I'd never do that just like I don't think you can. Feel what you feel, but remember that feelings aren't a license to act. You can absolutely think you're better than others but you don't have any right at all to act on it. You can't tell someone they're wrong for wanting to be something different than what they were yesterday and you can't force someone to love you. Blood comes only from stones that are thrown, and it takes a special kind of asshole to stone someone to death over a matter of disagreeing with how they live when that's not hurting anything but your self righteous sense of how it ought to be going.
So where did we go wrong? As I see it, we all went wrong when we started to think we were the only ones who had it right and then came up with the idea that we had to save the rest of the world by beating them to death until they agreed with us. I think we went wrong when we began to feverishly guard our self-imposed discomforts with stones and spears, when we weaponized ourselves against threats we perceived rather than harmonized against the plights we all know. I think we went wrong when we started thinking we could force anyone who didn't agree with us to get in line just because we didn't like being disagreed with. I think we went wrong thinking we were some moral authority. I think we went wrong thinking there's any right way for anyone but ourselves or that anyone had to come along for our ride who didn't want to be there.
I think we went wrong, trying desperately to be right for everyone. We went wrong trying to think there was a right road for the mass and that we should be forcing everyone else to into our lane instead of just staying in it ourselves. We went wrong trying to impose our way on others instead of giving everyone those inalienable rights in the Declaration of Independence in which the very title of said document says all it needs to:
Independence - adj: free from outside control; not depending on another's authority.
I won't pretend to know what's right for you. I won't ever claim that my truth is yours — especially not when it's so abundantly clear it isn't — but I'll do all any of us can ever really do when we want someone along on the ride of life: I'll ask.
I'll ask you to support and praise those who have gone to places you would like to be rather than strike them in the kneecaps so you can get ahead.
I'll ask you to believe you're more than the things you own and to start owning yourself instead.
I'll ask you to share your passion with the world, and let others take whatever roads they may.
I'll ask you to stop being right for everyone and instead just try and do right for yourself.
I'll ask you not to try to save the world by way of billy clubs and bullets, but instead by letting people flourish and live lives unfettered by people who think they know better.
I'll ask you to remember that, in taking away the freedoms of another, you're squandering the principles this country was founded upon.
I'll ask you to stop being tyrants, to treat your rabies, and to keep your disagreements behind your teeth unless you see someone trying to take away anyone's freedom.
I'll ask for a bit of sunshine to make its way out from under grey skies. I'll ask for the patience to see the weeks dwindle to days with a smile on my face. I'll ask for a better tomorrow for all of you, because that's what we all deserve, and then I'll work to try and carve that out for me while still leaving room for you — and I'll stop right there because it's all I can do.
With a humble heart, roaring fire, and wrung hat firmly in hand,
The Writer, an American, trying to make his way through the heartland of the Universe, just like you.
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