I wasn't going to write today. Honestly, I had intended to set the pens down after that stint earlier and just give the mind a day to recover. Too many loud thoughts can bore a hole in your head and vomit all over everything you have to say, but alas, my mind had other ideas. So, I did what any rational person would do. I put the boots on and wandered shirtless out into the cold. I screwed a cigarette between my lips, and uttered a single word - 'Fuck'.
It's not an expletive of stress, or even frustration, but rather surprise. It's like when a good friend comes to town and you already had plans. It's that social conundrum of obligation. In this case the choices were health over aspiration. Health didn't stand a chance.
So I finished the cigarette, stepped into the walk in, shivered like a wet dog, and reached for the bottle of Rum by the door. I decided against an over abundance of posioning at this hour and decided to mix it with blueberry and pomegranate juice, add some ice even. It was a doomed endeavor from the start. The juice exploded all over the place and I, again, was cursing aloud while trying to clean it up with some paper towel and the aforementioned boots. It took a lot longer than it should have, but being armed with a strong enough drink, it didn't really matter.
Flipping the lights off I trudged up the stairs to my cave, mildly wounded, grumbling like a caveman who'd just let dinner get away and would now be feasting on leaves and berries again. Resigning to it and flopping down into my chair with a groan - I already wanted another cigarette - I pulled up the word-pad, grabbed the notebook from the filthy coffee table next to me, dug a pen out of the drawer and set to work.
I understand, better than I ever have honestly, that I've adopted a monumental task to take on my shoulders. It's dauntingly difficult to keep up all the appearances, more so than I normally admit, and it's become a mad scene of indulgence and excess that seems to be taking the best and brightest by storm. It's a tall glass to climb over, and the rim of the glass is sharp. Still, my inner Jung is strong like an Ox and my outer Sartre shows no signs of slowing down. The love child these two personality blindly fucked into existence? I can't complain about it too much really. It's a fuel that keeps the fire hot enough to split water into hydrogen and keep right on burning well past the Midnight oil.
I've come to understand in recent days that the stage is all wrong for what I intend to do. There's an edge, an I can see it in all its glory. It's a white sandy beach with dried palm umbrellas and crystal ocean waters. It's silent save the sound of a calling bird and the jingle-jangle of melting ice in my glass. It's a bit of shade from the hot sun, it's a pen tucked between my teeth and a dirty pair of sunglasses sliding down my nose as I peer into the horizon of everything. This cold climate is ill suited to ambition. It's freezing it out like molasses running uphill.
So, here I am, staring at the edge from afar. I can't rightly accept this at all. It goes against the entire principle of what I'm trying to preach. No longer am I content to see the things I want through glass panes, no matter the colors, but instead I've decided to set myself down and get to the brass tax adventure that's going to bring the sun down over the horizon. There's an adventure coming and it's going to take me over that edge. It's going to get twisted enough to blur those lines. It's going to break the boundaries that separate the waking dreams from the ones we have with eyes closed. It's taking a raw idea and molding it into a reality.
Pulling the suitcase out of the closet, I began madly stuffing it with the essentials before I realized I had no idea what they were. In my youth - times when I was much more obsequious to the hallows of danger, while at the same time foolish enough to not really understand what 'risk' really meant - I had assumed that dark sunglasses, boots, and some manner of personal mantra was enough. Maybe in those days it had been, but this was different. This was not something that could be handled with simple words and a strong Whiskey - never mind trying to cart that kind of thing on a plane these days.
Every since that fateful day the proper travel arsenal had gotten harder and harder to travel with - for awhile you couldn't even pack a lighter in your carry on. Cramping that many people in a tight space at thirty thousand feet - the prime altitude for panic - and denying them the ability to release themselves promptly upon hitting the ground is dangerous. Fortunately the advent of sky-way robbery - drink prices that make upper crust New York Bars look cheap - seem to be an acceptable persuasion. That didn't change the fact that I had to find a way to get this done. It was important.
The proper stage for setting this kind of thing is beyond important. We've all been taught that dreams are something to aim for and accept some half-masted facsimile of it, like it's good enough. Sure, that's not the lesson, but that's the realistic principle of experience. All young children start out with grand ambition, and through temperament and reality it's slowly beaten down.
Would be Doctors become High school Nurses. Would be headshrinkers become Janitors. Would be Athletes become Gym Teachers. These are all honorable professions, ones that arguably meet more of the ideals of the dream - I arguably had more heart to hearts about the world and what to expect from it from those who failed - than the actuality of it, but that's not the point. The point is these good, honest, toilers never took their shot. Maybe they never had the means, maybe they never had the will.
Maybe it's because we come from a generation that hit adulthood on the tail end of a complacent generation. The Sixties had sexual and political revolutions. The Seventies and Eighties dealt with the drown out disco culture, AIDS, and smattering dashes of a lot of things that came before. Still, it was a hollow echo from my perspective. The 90s? They were a generation of dying comics and cultural values pounded into the dirt. A war few cared about motivated by who knows what. Everyone seemed relatively happy with their lot, and what few angry dissidents there were, were too attached to the things they owned to really gamble it all away on the roulette wheel of protest. Even myself, for as self aware of the world as I tried to be, didn't care much about using the voice I was struggling to find. They were the days of the chrysalis, where everything I'd later become was to be fueled by all the things I had to later learn to live without.
Then it was our turn at bat, and right before we stepped out to the plate, it all came crashing down. All the ideas of Reaganomics, the fraudulent lies we'd been told about taxes, whether someone did or did not inhale - and where he may, or may not have stuck a cigar - didn't hold a candle to the hailstorm that was about to follow. It arrived out of nowhere in the shape of a Jet Airliner crashing into the World Trade Center. I remember flipping on the television right as the phone rang. I didn't pick it up. I stared blankly, in abject horror, at the sights in front of me. My transition into adulthood was right in front of me and, already, I knew the party was over.
Still, in general, those around me were content to swallow the bitter medicine they started feeding us left and right. I saw kids, years younger than I, pounded senseless for looking like they might hail from Middle Eastern backgrounds, I saw gas stations looted and decades of racial tolerance crumble into a nightmare. We were content not to stand up for anything and I saw the best years of life get wasted. Drunk on rage and inertia, absent of the truth. Those first few years out in the world were awful. I stayed silent for most of them, still struggling to find a way to capture that screaming voice inside my head and put it into motion. It's one of the things that's haunted me well into my adult life.
It took nearly ten years, for people to finally start calling out for change, howling with enough voices - at a loud enough volume - for something to happen. Still, it was lie after lie. I could handle that. I'd tasted that medicine already, and - despite being refusing to swallow it anymore - it was the standard of my generation. It wasn't until I took a long look back at the up and coming that I really understood the damage it had done.
When you go camping, there's always a sign: "Leave it like you found it - if not better". Maybe not everyone's really given their fair shot at looking at the future in such a fashion. Our time here isn't infinite. We all die - unfortunate as that is - and what we leave behind has been getting uglier and uglier all the time. That is the point. That's why the setting and stage for this is as important as it is - if you're going to attempt to sound a call, you can't half ass it like most everyone who's come before.
You've got to do it and "Everything worth doing, is worth doing right".
No comments:
Post a Comment