This space, although originally intended to house mostly creative short stories, has unintentionally started to show it’s wear, leaving traces of myself too close for comfort. It could be too soon to tell, but I’m self aware enough to predict the early urges to quote Hunter S. Thompson. The journal entries and crises so common to people my age, tucked comfortably and typed without restraint by the fingers of the fattened ‘new’ bourgeoise, the kids with the newest everything, and an infinite enyclopedic knowledge of all unknown things that are yet to unravel on the internet. For good measure, talk of God is expectedly thrown in as well. For whatever reason, scratch that- l-o-n-e-l-i-n-e-s-s, it has become celebrated, even necessary to shed both the most sacred and mundane details of existence. I fear I’ve become something of a nihilist.
All the while, it feels as though I’m nursing a gaping wound spilling from outside of my own brain, and no one, not a damn soul is concerned with how very immediate, desperate and fatal the situation really is. The efforts that I make to appear fine are a poorly placed bandaid. Doesn’t just about everyone feel this way?
To those who don’t know, the plain fact is that I’ve been searching for a home for sometime now, and can’t seem to find it. I can’t even throw in the towel and ‘give up’ because there is literally nowhere to go back to. I moved back out to California months ago, and the infinite possibilities of my life is not liberating, it is scary. Most days, especially when even the sun will not have it’s way, I’ll read the words of Thompson, the literary pioneer of poverty, the original drifter, and take great comfort that our paths seem to follow the same trajectory. Poor, poor, poor. Not one blessed response, and just enough articles published to keep going a few more days. Not one place to call home, to rest our heads and feel that all the world is safe and good.
In my formative years of travel and my own swollen idealism about the world, and the good people that live there- I’d developed an impressive tolerability for whatever poor hand I was dealt. Sleep on the floor? Absolutely. No hot water. Okay. Beans and rice.. again. Fine. These things don’t bother me, and they are what allow me to risk far more than most people, because I always had that shimmering thought that my life would work out and that I would be welcomed kindly, things would always be in my favour. It was formulaic: do good, and you shall be rewarded.
The heartwrenching nosedive life takes post-idealism lands you squarely into a realm of basic survival. It makes for frightful nightmares, waking up in places that smell foreign, even after your own suitcase collects dust. What happens when it doesn’t work out? For those floating through life with infinite pockets, cars, and a place with their own door and key, I don’t necessarily want your life but likewise, it’s a real bore to be with or to be without.
I’ve successfully de-mystified all cities, because I’ve seen too many of them to care about any one in particular. None of them special, all of them plentiful with starbucks and stop signs.
If life really were like ‘choose your own adventure’ I’d dream of a place of my own in a city, with an address I have time to memorize, rather than scratched on a notepad to know where to receive temporary mail from. I’d dream of hot meals, and days to buy all the things I don’t really need, just because I could. (I may be a virtuous non-consumer, but shit.. sometimes you just want things!). If you noticed that I left out the part about the dream job, it’s because I no longer believe that it exists. There are only really jobs that are less awful than the awful ones.
The sadness that wells in my eye sockets just thinking about how violently boring adult life mostly is can be unbearable. Oh, complacency, please fill my brain with all your terrible and seductive suggestions.
I’ll keep digesting Thompsons words like medicine,
“IN THE COURSE OF A RAMBLING, NERVOUS DISCOURSE ON SOME ABSOLUTELY IRRELEVANT SUBJECT, I EXPOSE MYSELF…to myself…AS A SEVERE NEUROTIC, a virtual headless chicken, totally incapable of making value judgments, and running on a rum-soaked treadmill towards a schizophrenic rainbow in a two-dimensional sky.
I don’t know why or how, but this suddenly dawned on me like a flash of black lightning. I was feverishly talking about a million plans at once when it came to me: not all at once, to be sure- for the pieces have been slowly falling into place for the past two months- but suddenly enough to make me stop and think, and then stop talking and leave the room and think some more. It was like walking nervously into a dark room and finding myself in front of a mirror when the light suddenly flashed on.
In brief, I find that I’ve never channeled my energy long enough to send it in any one direction. I’m all but completely devoid of a sense of values: psychologically unable to base my actions on any firm beliefs, because I find I have no firm beliefs. I seem to be unable to act consistently or effectively, because I have no values on which to base my decisions. As I look back, I find that I’ve been taught to believe in nothing. I have no god and I find it impossible to believe in man. On every side of me, I see thousands engaged in the worship of money, security, prestige, symbols, even snakes. I’m beginning to see what Kerouac means when he says, “I want God to show me his face”: it is not the statement, but what the statement implies: “I want to believe in something”. The man is more of a spokesman than most people think…and he speaks for more than thieves, hopheads and whores.”
Pondering…
Hunter.
