What I'm Looking For

I can’t help but feel that if I just ran the hell away from here, my life would be okay. If I buy a plane ticket tomorrow for Death Valley, and just walk, take nothing with me, just… go. I feel like my life’s been building up to this. I feel like somewhere behind this padlocked skull, there’s momentum building, there’s a coiled spring, waiting to launch me into another life, another reality, I can’t help but realize that it’s probably all a symptom, but at the same time…

What if I did?

Tomorrow. If I got off work tomorrow, bought a plane ticket, and mailed my phone and a letter of thanks and apology to the three people keeping me sane right now, if I disappeared like a puff of smoke into the wind, if I never came back…

I keep trying to work on these stories. They’re all half-finished, they all look bleaker and bleaker the harder I try to fix them. Nothing seems to fit, nothing seems to matter, I can’t think straight and my brain is twisted into knots, nothing fits or works or sounds right and just… I don’t know whether it’s me, or my environment, or just… I don’t know. I haven’t mailed my college application off yet. I don’t know why. I finished it a week ago.

I’m not stupid, or naïve, I like to think. I like to think I’ve washed all the romanticism out of my head with cynicism, and then replaced the cynicism with idealism, and then watered that down with reality and beautifully gray skies. The thing is, it’s a Romantic’s dream, running away. Buying a spontaneous plane ticket to Death Valley? That’s a castle in the air, man. But, oh, God, I want it.

I want to get the hell out of here, to pack my guitar and my laptop and a bunch of notebooks, and just go. And to wander, across deserts, and through old, deserted towns, and bustling cities, and grasslands, and fields, and forests, to just wander, to fast and meditate and find what I’m looking for, to hear more than the voices in my head, to meet people with odd and strange viewpoints, and learn from people who had no teachers, to sing in places where the sky touches the ground, to find the soft places between the worlds, to live.

And someday, I want to stumble back into town, and see my friends again, and share adventures, and hear all about how they took their potential and their grand dreams and spirits and souls and lives and did something amazing, about how they realized all of their dreams, and all of their potential, and how they changed the world, and how they’re big, real, more awesome than ever now, and how they fill the world around them. And I’ll tell them stories about how I saw the eagles freefalling with their talons locked, and I climbed down the Grand Canyon wall, and crossed whitewater rapids on foot, and where I finally met Coyote and here’s the scar I got from where he tricked me into picking up a hot coal, and what it looks like to see the sun set over the Edge of the Very World, and being in places where it rains all the time and where it never rains, and just, just and then… and then I can settle down, maybe, and things will be easier to understand, or maybe I’ll just turn back around and go out again, and and and I don’t even know.

Castles in the air. If you jump for them, you more often than not fall back to Earth and break your spine, but there’s always the off chance you’ll catch onto something on the way.

Disclaimer:

Now, I may have a messiah complex as big as Bono's.

but.

But I believe, somewhere between skin and soul, I believe that I have a calling, that God put me here to do something. I believe that I am supposed to be out there helping fix this world. I believe that I can change the world.

Someday, slavery will be gone from every continent. Someday, no one will die of mosquito bites, of a disease we cured over a century ago. Someday, people will not starve in a world of plenty, someday children will not be murdered for the color of their skin, someday enough people will care, someday this kind of shit won't happen anymore.

I believe that I was given this life for a reason, and if I don't work on that I will have wasted this gift. I believe, somewhere inside of me, that I was given the dreams and visions that come to me for a reason, and that through Christ I can do all things, and also that it is distinctly possible that Coyote was sent to help me, or decided to help me, and I have faith that this is not blasphemy, that my ancestors believed it for a reason, and that there is behind me a Trickster who will lend me his strength if I ask him.

As I thought this on the way home, my mind immediately spiraled off into the mythic dimension, and before more than a few seconds had passed I had to shut off the train of thought concerning Coyote, because it would lead me to... well, vision over visibility. An illusion, a trick. But mark my words.

This will not stand. There is a day coming when this world will be at peace, when love will triumph hate and bitterness, when despair will be washed away. This world will change.

Whatever is not an expression of apathy, it's the eye of the storm.

To Whom It May Concern, and with all due respect,

My attitude is not defined by the speech-pattern of apathetic dismissal, "Whatever."

My attitude is defined by the final word with which I choose to leave your company, and most people's-- that is to say, "Peace." Which is, in case you didn't know, a shortened form of the full farewell, which is to say, "Peace be with you."

Peace be with you. Peace unto you, and your loved ones, and peace be unto this world, this torn and scarred world, this home of our fragile human race, which is within our power to make a heaven or a hell.

My attitude is in the songs I sing along roads and under echoing bridges and to the open night sky, songs like Sunday Bloody Sunday, songs that fan the flames of my soul, lyrics that grip my heart in a vise. My attitude is in the lines "Where you live should not decide / Whether you live or whether you die" because that is where my passion lies.

I say things like "Whatever," I shrug, I grin and laugh it off often, because my mind is occupied with stories, with dreams, with love and hope and fire and pain and longing, and whether it's the date or the initials that come first on an invoice doesn't even scratch the surface of any of those things. I won't say I couldn't care less, because on some level I do care-- I shrug it off because the mistake's been made, and file away the information for next time. Whether I remember it or not depends on other factors.

Someday, I won't have to walk into a store, pick up an object, and wonder if it was made by hired workers or forced slavery. Someday, enough people will care, enough people will care and think and speak and work, and slavery will be eradicated. Someday, children will stop dying from diseases cured centuries in the past, and people will care as much for the starving continents away as the starving in the slums of the next city over. Someday, this world will cease to be a hell for most of the people in it.

I repeat this to myself at least once a day. I have to. I force myself to believe it as I speak it, to see it in my mind, a world without a hell that could so easily be prevented, because if I start to believe that it won't happen, it hurts, so bad I want to cry.

When I put the earbuds back in my pocket, and I shake the snow or the dust or the rainwater off of my shoes and jacket and walk in, I shake off the passion and fury and sorrow that wars within me, because if I didn't have walls to put it up behind, it would consume me. I'd be impossible to put up with-- more than I already am, that is. But it doesn't go away. Know that. It doesn't go away ever, and I never stop caring, and I am never, ever apathetic. I'm just distant.

Peace, dude.

New beats, repeats, endings and beginnings--

So it's New Year's Eve, and I just went on facebook and friended a guy I met last night who I really wanted to get to know. Today and yesterday I looked at a handful of choices for food and chose vegan ones. Last night and the night before I was up until about two in the morning with friends... but that's less to the point, I guess.

Look, my point is this. It's a new year. I don't believe in living by the arbitrary lines of a calendar, but it's a new year, all the same. By the end of this year, I will be full-on vegan. I will be in college, one way or another. I will have finished at least one novel, and will be writing every single day, outside of college stuff. I will be able to sing and play guitar, and well. That's just... what's going to happen. Will I be happy? That remains to be seen. But I'm not going to sit around and let life just happen around me anymore.

2010 will be a year of grace, mercy, forgiveness; 2010 will be a year of faith, of confidence and spirituality; 2010 will be the year I stop existing and start living.

We'll See.

So I didn’t write a 50,000 word novel this month, again. It’s not the first time. I’d like to pull a Linus and close panel on the classic pose, shaking my fist at the sky – Just Wait ‘Til Next Year! But I think I’ll go one step wishy-washy on this one, and say instead, Just Wait ‘Til Some Time In The Future, Unspecified At The Moment But Definitely Inevitable In The Long Run! Because next year, I will be in school again, working my ass off to fulfill my potential as a student of journalism. And, with that in mind, I won’t just be doing homework and kind of working on studies, I will be throwing myself actively towards learning as much as I can, and, given the writing component of journalism, this means my writer’s-head will be getting plenty of exercise without novel-induced craziness.

But someday, and I don’t mean that vague “Someday,” as in, “Some Time In The Future, When I Make Time For It,” I mean someday as in “As Soon As I’m Done With College Even If It Kills Me,” I will write a novel. Fully, and working as hard as I can, and it will be a thing of beauty and I will make people laugh, and cry, the way I do reading about Harry Dresden. This is non-negotiable.

So I didn’t write a novel this year. A more cynical person than I might point out the fact that I’ve never finished a written work of any significant length. But I’m through being that person, and I’d rather dwell on the fact that I got farther into this thing than I ever have before. And if I can finish short stories (which I can, by the way), I can finish a novel. Just wait ‘til next time.

It Doesn't Have To BE This Way

There’s a website which I often fool around on called TV Tropes, which analyzes common themes found in different media; some of you may be familiar with it. One of the tropes discussed at length there is the “Crapsack World,” which is… well, exactly what it sounds like. Here’s one of the descriptions in the summary: “An immutable Crapsack World has corruption and pain Inherent In The System, both physically and metaphysically. Trying to fight this corruption will always result in it winning.”

So basically, this describes a world that is inherently unfair, a world in which good is not only useless, but often counter-productive. This is a world where the evil overlord wins. This is a world where humanity really is reduced to numbers, where the Daleks succeed because the universe doesn’t care; this is a world where a sonic screwdriver and a brilliant smile will get you killed, regardless of how clever or powerful you are, how strongly you want to save the world. This is a universe where the more unfortunate people of the world are taken into slavery to serve the whims of the culture on the other side of the world who doesn’t know or care about their plight. This is a world where an entire population can be decimated on a whim, once more to benefit a class more useful to the people in power, and no one bats an eye. This is a world where those born into poverty and disease and starvation are, more or less, thought of as deserving of such a fate; this is a world where Scrooge was right.

This is our world.

And speaking against any of that makes you a bleeding heart, an emotion-driven basket-case, and it pits you straight up against the power-driven universe, in a world where greed and oppression are rewarded and selflessness is mercilessly stamped out.

I’m not exaggerating. This isn’t hyperbole.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again, and I will keep on saying it until the day I die.

THIS IS NOT RIGHT. I don’t give a used fig as to what your personal beliefs concerning the semantics and wordplay of “ethics” versus “morality,” or which political party you support, or whether you’re an independent or a moderate or on the fringes or outside altogether.

If you are supporting slavery, genocide, if you have nothing to say to this world we’re living in, if you don’t believe that there is something very, very, wrong with what’s going on in this world, get the hell off of my friends list. I don’t care if you're a conservative who believes capitalism is the only thing that will save this world from itself, or you’re an anarchist who believes capitalism is what’s killing this world. You should be fighting for the same ends right now. There are people being driven into slavery, not only in Mali and Cote d’Ivoire, but on this continent, in the cities and the suburbs and all around us. There are people dying on the streets, of malaria. A disease that was cured over a century ago. Not a lot of people know that. Mosquito bites are killing more people in this world than any other animal. Mosquito bites. Death. By. Mosquito. Death by a disease we cured. A disease that’s become a joke in this country. That doesn’t even touch the disease we haven’t cured, AIDS, which people are also dying like flies from.

That’s the one that makes me sick – people believe, somehow people allow themselves to be convinced that it’s not that important. They deserve it, right? Just like the kids born into starvation deserve to die before they reach adulthood, and the people being laid off from their jobs in this very country deserved that, and they deserve to be homeless on the streets with their families, the filthy savages. But not on our streets, no, how about the darker part of town, tucked away somewhere we don’t have to see them? This country makes me sick sometimes. I’m an American, that much is true. I believe in freedom, and I mean that literally. I believe everyone should be free. I believe that freedom is a human right, not an American right. I believe in liberty, and I believe in justice. I believe that no one should die because of a damned bug bite. I believe women who are raped are never ‘asking for it,’ I believe that in a world where there is enough food to go around, no one should starve to death. I believe that it is twisted, sick, and downright evil to refuse homeless men the basement of a church to sleep in on winter nights -- to let them freeze to death in their sleep -- because it brings them too close to the business district.

To be fair, not many people know the reality of all of this. (That's why it's important to do this. Because people don't know.) It’s mentioned in passing, occasionally, but rarely expanded on. We’re very careful, this country is, of tucking things that make our viewers uncomfortable out of sight. We wouldn’t want to lose our viewers. We wouldn’t want to make them too uncomfortable, to make them turn aside to somewhere where the view is a little more pleasant.

Don’t forget this. There is nothing – nothing – that makes you somehow innately more worthy of life than someone else on this planet. I’m a Christian, infinitely more than I am an American. That’s what I believe. I believe in unconditional love, and unconditional forgiveness. You were born (for most of you, anyway) in a wealthy country, if not a wealthy home. Your parents were able to feed you, because they’d worked hard, but also because they’d been born to a land of opportunity. That is why you are here, and not starving to death, or dying of malaria or AIDS, or being beaten to death in the cacao fields on the Gold Coast. Because you were born here, and not there. It doesn’t make you a bad person – but it doesn’t make your life worth more than theirs, either. A life is a life is a life. Please, please remember that.

This world has become a horrible, horrible place -- we don't have to leave it that way. We don't have to submit silently to what this world has become. I mentioned earlier that in this universe, morality is punished and powerlust is rewarded. I don't believe that's Just The Way It Is, I believe it's the way the human race has made it. And we can change that. It's not idealistic to believe that conscience should overrule politics.

Politics are supposed to be a way to follow your conscience; they are not supposed to subvert it for the party values.

I'll say it once again.

We don't have to take this. If you have a conscience, if you want to see this world become something other than a prison, do it. Don't wait for a signal. You ARE the signal.

Introducing...

My room is ice cold, or so it feels to my fingers as they try to type. Yet somehow, I haven't the will to close the window. There will not be many days or nights to come wherein I can leave it open; I savor the few left me. I should go to bed an hour ago, but I need to get this out and off of my mind first. Or at least cement it in my mind, so the shadow can take a form and I can start to figure it out.

I sat down to do a few things; the latter was a letter, a prayer, something like both. I want to throw the material bits of this life away and find a spiritual truth, and my spirit is... well, pathetically weak. I come up with a thousand excuses, vague as steam and not nearly so substantial, why I can't. The fact is, I think I'm afraid of what I'll find. To plunge oneself into the void... to throw oneself into the wave, even though the strength be so great that all your strength came to naught. Yeah. That fear. Unsurprising, really. But anyway.

Today, my friend jolted me out of the rut I'd fallen into, lit a fire under me, made me remember how I felt-- dear God, that was less than a month ago. Wow. Anyway, I remember, now, the purpose of all this striving. I will become a journalist; I will write the truth, and publish it, and expose the people who control this world to the reality of what it is, as compared to what it could, or should, be. Rephrased a bit, that's what I believe. That's what I want to do. No, that's a part of what I want to do. That's what conscience demands of me. I -want- to tell stories, to spin the worlds and characters in me into tales, to spellbind people with the craft I was born to an understanding of. The problem with this is two-fold. Firstly, I have little skill as of yet, and those tales, if I give them voice, deserve better. Secondly, it is exceedingly hard to turn a living on story-telling. I will have to wait.

And, as I said, conscience demands more of me than that. The truth of this world, the horrors that lurk beneath a glamorous surface, have been laid bare to me. What would I be if I ignored them? How can I ignore the murder and slavery and poverty and disease that are directly caused by the Western lifestyle?

I can't.

And, to that end, I will become a journalist, and I will force people to look this monster in the face until someone decides to DO SOMETHING about it.

there's other matters to talk about, mainly the affliction of my conscience still regarding anarchists and former-idealist-chefs and my own part in theft and betrayal. and also the return of nightmares. but that can wait a little longer.

Talkin' to my Generation

Right now, I am wondering why Mr. Kanye West – why anyone, actually – has felt the need to go on record calling themselves “the voice of a generation.” Why does this generation need a voice to speak for us? We all have minds, hearts, and voices, do we not? Why, then, are we so silent? How is it that we have opinions on fashion, on pop culture, even on petty national politics at times, yet we remain oblivious to the world outside of our lifestyles? We should not be depending on Kanye West, Barack Obama, or Rush Limbaugh to voice opinions for us. We have minds. We have hearts, we have voices. Why are we allowing ourselves to be led by the nose, like so many idle sheep? Educate yourselves! Listen to your conscience and speak out! There is slavery in Africa, upheld by the mainstream chocolate industry. There is genocide in the Sudan, upheld by the Chinese government. Peaceful protesters are being brutally put down in Iran. Aung San Suu Kyi has spent the greater part of the last twenty years under house arrest in Burma for speaking out. Here in America, there are entire families homeless and without food or shelter. In countries all over the globe, there are young children working endless hours in deplorable conditions without even enough money to live on. What are we doing about it? We depend on politicians to get things done; we elect them for their elegant promises, and then consider our duties to the world done. I am not targeting any one politician; they have all betrayed us the same. We cannot simply cast a vote on election day, and then walk home to go back to our lives as though the world had been changed. We cannot ignore the condition of this world.

You have a mind. You have a voice. You have the right to be free, to live and breathe and eat and drink and laugh; do you not have the responsibility to fight, to give that freedom to every other living person on this planet? We are born into our circumstances; we do not inherently deserve what we are given at birth any more than any other human born to any other parents in any other place. There is no reason why being born in America should give you more of a right to be free, just as being born in a village in Darfur does not mean you deserve to be raped and killed. But we’ve inherited this world, our generation has. We’ve inherited this world full of smooth-tongued, power-hungry politicians, and we’ve inherited some kind of system that tells us that on one side there are good guys, and the other side is not to be trusted. I tell you now that this is a lie. There is good and bad on both sides; both sides are labels. Stop listening to the fanatics on both sides of the system! Read the facts, from as many trustworthy places as you can, and then follow your own conscience. Stop letting others speak for you! You have a mind! You have a voice! Your voice is important, what is behind it is important; your mind, your conscience, your freedom is your birthright, as it is with every other human on this planet. Do not let it be taken from you!

Please. We’ve lain silent long enough—too long. It’s time to stop letting people speak for us, decide for us; we’re adults, or we soon will be. It’s time to start thinking about the world we’ve been born into, it’s time to step up. We’ve been born to this Earth, for better or worse—how will we leave it?

Things in my life, literal and otherwise

On my desk, which has finally been organized, I keep a handful of rocks. There is a dark gray rock that fits almost perfectly in my fist, which I kicked along the park once, and decided to keep; the feel of it, solid, cold, heavy in my palm reminded me that I was real. The second rock is a polished tiger-eye, very reddish in color, compared to most stones of that nature. It’s very pretty, and it reminds me of Mohan, my friend. Then there’s a little piece of clinker, very dark gray, like a shadow on the bottom of a river, it glistens in the right light; I found it in my favorite park, by the riverside, upstream. Two more rocks my best friend gave me, smooth and flat and elliptical, one more tawny and one more gray, a pencil-gray, both the right size to hold in my hand at night. The sixth rock is a small lump of pink granite, black-flecked, that I found at the beach; the seventh is a tan, white, dark rock that I picked up from the sidewalk on my way home, last night, after a friend told me everything that was in my own heart, poisoning me from the inside out. I’d known; before leaving, I’d written something along the same lines, bemoaning my inaction and resolving to get off my ass and do something. But hearing it from someone else was kind of painful, which I should have seen coming. Perceptive friends are a double-edged sword.

I loved the person I was on the road to becoming; I wanted to be that person, I want to be someone who lives life to the fullest, someone who cares and creates and loves. I hate the person I am, I hate the person I am becoming now, instead. I have no creative energy, I waste most of my days daydreaming without doing anything about it, I sit around and do nothing. I am, quite simply, a waste of space right now.

There is a lot of shit being thrown at me in life right now. I’d love to use that as a shield; in my own mind, I have been, have been excusing all my lackluster as an effect of the world around me. This is basically complete bullshit. There are so many things that could be worse in my life, I have been so lucky, and there really is no excuse for my situation right now. I’m not going to college because I fucked up my grades and then didn’t apply to enough schools. I’m not going to Sacramento because I didn’t get a second job soon enough, didn’t save carefully enough. I’m still living with my family—well, because I’m not going to college and don’t have enough money to move to Sacramento. This is no excuse to laze around and whine.

There’s a mirror on the dresser, to my right. I don’t hate the person looking back at me, most of the time. I used to. I hate the potential there, and I hate the lack of energy. I hate the potential because it forces me onward, because I don’t want to waste the few things I do have. I hate the lack of energy because it’s my own fault, because I could do better. I hate that people see more in me than is really there. I hate that my friends think I’m so damned smart, I hate that I can’t hide my faults from them, I hate making an idiot of myself so often. I hate the irresponsibility, and I love the foolhardiness. I try not to hate myself. That way lies madness; most ways, actually, lead to madness. I try not to think about that too hard, or I wind up curling up into a useless ball in a corner for hours. I wish I was joking. I wish I wasn’t crazy.

One of the things I hate about mental illness, one of the major things, is that it really is a life sentence. That’s one of the first things a friend told me, when I told everyone what the diagnosis was: she said, “It’s not a life sentence.” But it is. It changes the way people look at you, even your best friends, even the people who accept you. For the rest of your life, people will expect certain things from you; for the rest of your life, if you show some quirk in behavior, people will ask, “Have you been taking your meds?” And if you say yes, they will roll their eyes in semi-disbelief, or wry acceptance, and if you say no, they will sigh hopelessly and either give you a lecture, or simply be content with quiet disappointment, far worse than any lecture. And it will never go away. And you will never be normal, and you will never be accepted, and you will never be able to fit in.

But, for all that, there’s really no excuse for sitting around whining about it. The only way to get around something like that is to take the shit you have, and do something with it. So, even if this story is horseshit, I may as well write it, if for nothing better than to satisfy the characters.

The Flip Side of Freedom

The funny thing is that to most people, this is the regular side of things—the panic, the scary feeling in the pit of your stomach, that What If I Don’t Make It feeling, is the flip side. And I guess it is to me, too, because I was excited for this time for years before I was afraid of it. Kind of like an iceberg, in the distance—you see it far away, and it’s so pretty and so cool and you just want to explore it. As you get closer, you start to realize how big it is, and then you look down and realize that it’s even bigger, under the surface, and you wonder what, exactly, you’re in for, here. And then, if you’re like me, you panic, but that current that you were so glad for, before, carrying you in, is now even stronger, and you’re stuck. And, if you have good friends to talk to, then you start to realize that it’s a really good thing the iceberg is so big, because that gives you way more space to explore.

Of course, that’s all writing from the viewpoint of a young seal or something. If you’re approaching an iceberg in a large ship, well, you’re screwed. But it’s probably way more fun to live life as a Weddell Seal or something, than aboard a ship. When have you ever seen a seal acting all depressed? Nah, seals know what life’s about—like otters. I bet you’ve never seen a depressed otter, either. Man, those things know how to live. Floating around on their backs all the time, rolling around in the surf, barking up a storm… man, otters know what it’s all about. I wish I was an otter.

But hey, not being small and furry and able to swim like a fish and still breathe free air doesn’t mean I can’t have fun with my life. It really is just… a whole world out there, waiting to be explored, waiting—I can do anything. Anything! What can’t I do? Well, I can’t fly. I can’t turn into an otter, I can’t do magic. But outside of that… I could do anything! I could spend the rest of my life as a starving artist on the streets of New Haven! I could start growing a garden, a little bit at a time, selling whatever I could, and eventually wind up with my own farm. I could spend my life stealing apples from orchards at night and selling them on the black apple market! I could START the black market for apples! If there isn’t one already.

In all seriousness, though, there’s a lot out there, and I think I’ll be just fine in the end. My biggest fear is that I’ll get caught up into some rhythm, some cycle that I don’t like, or don’t agree with, and wind up doing that for the rest of my life. The daily grind—I don’t want to trap myself in something that’s going to grind my life down on me. My second biggest fear is that I’ll start living with money as an end, rather than a means. I already have to check myself on that thought process—it’s part of what attracted me to anarchy. If I could live without money for the rest of my life… I mean, I can. But I don’t know if that lifestyle is for me. I do know that I will not find happiness if I start thinking like a businessman, which is why I freaked out when my friend started talking about opening a business. If I had the option to make it as a business owner, eventually owning this huge company, this corporation, I would… probably turn it down. I hope I’d turn it down. That life is too easy—no matter how difficult it is to do the business thing or whatever, I would fall into it, the material comfort, the lifestyle, and I’m terrified I wouldn’t be able to let that go. I don’t want to be that person. I don’t want material comforts, I want a challenge. I want to live, I want to breathe air untainted by perfumes or chemicals or burning flesh, I want every day to push myself to the limit, body and soul, I want to sing my heart out, I want to fast in the desert, I want to live. Spending my days in an office on a tower, no matter how luxurious and big, and my nights in a luxurious apartment, with whatever material things I wanted at my beck and call, is not, in my opinion, living. It’s existence, yes, it’s technically being alive, but… it’s a life that I think epitomizes the verse “Gain the whole world and lose your own soul.”

So that’s what I’m afraid of, in a nutshell. I’m afraid of falling into the trap of a pattern; I’m afraid of becoming fat and happy; I’m afraid of not living a life that will fill my soul, or a life that fills my body, and not my soul. I’d rather die tomorrow than wind up in that board meeting thirty years from now.

But, what I’d forgotten is that I have that choice. No one’s really pressuring me into anything (unless you count a serious pressure from friends to do something that will make me happy), it’s not like I’m already on that path. I just have to… live. Which I will be more than happy to do.

Freedom is a scary thing

I don’t know what I want to do with my life anymore. I’m starting to wonder if I ever did, if I wasn’t just fooling myself. I know that the only place I feel at peace is away from the world, but in this world that doesn’t mean too much. The more I try to figure things out, the less things seem to make any sense. I know I don’t really want to live anymore—not under this world’s rules. But what choice do I have? I’m a sorry excuse for an anarchist; I’m just kidding myself there, too. In the end, I really have no idea whatsoever.

No wonder kids my age make such easy targets for cults, the army, whatever. We literally have no idea what the hell to do with ourselves—we have all this youth, this energy, our passion hasn’t been killed off by the grind yet, and people are constantly telling us to use it, because it won’t last, etc. But we still aren’t set in our identities yet, we still don’t know. I don’t know ANYTHING. All this fire in my soul has no outlet—it’s just burning me, right now, consuming me from the inside out.

That, and every time I turn around, someone’s trying to push some huge choice on me. “Do you like going to school—would you rather spend every day working in a factory for sixteen hours?” I did not realize those were my only choices. “Work hard in school, or you’ll wind up breaking your back struggling for a living for the rest of your life!” Of course, that’s what you’ll do anyway, this just gives you more choice in how. And then there’s living on the fringe, refusing that whole ‘work for a living’ lifestyle. Which, in the end, is just as much of a prison, and it doesn’t last indefinitely anyway.

I don’t want to live like this. Part of me really wishes I could die before I get into college, so I don’t have to make these choices. Then I realize that that would mean that this would have been my whole life—misery, basically, with little cracks of light showing through here and there. If I don’t get out of this house, I’ll wish I died the day I was born.

So that leaves me right back where I started from, with a day of freedom looming over my head, but no idea what to do with it when it gets here. I have no plan, I have no idea, I’m left clinging to this island of stability that I’ve been trying to get off of since I was dumped here. I should just abandon myself to the current, I guess, and let life take me where it will, but that’s not an easy thing to comprehend. What, just let go? Let go of this life… it’s what I have to do, I guess. If I don’t have a plan now, I’ll just… figure something out. Take things day by day, I guess.

The thing is, no matter how hard I try to think rationally, there’s this seed of panic in me that will not go away, and it’s a pretty scary thing. The rational thing to do, or at least the emotionally rational thing, or at least the thing I would normally do, is talk to someone older and wiser, who’s been here, and ask for help. But I know what they’ll say, I think. Maybe not, but for the most part “Yeah, no one really knows what they want to do at your age.” Most kids switch majors halfway through—I used to have the statistic, but I no longer remember it. “Just take things one step at a time; you’ll be alright.” Depending on who I talk to, I’ll get variations of that, along with different advice and ideas and whatnot. My dad might be upset with me, he doesn’t know how much time I’ve wasted in school, and his reaction would be the most surprised, but he’d wind up saying the same thing.

And, once more, right back where I started from. Stuck in a panic, about to be set adrift, with no idea whatsoever what I’m going to do with my life.

But hopefully I'm not really a witch

You know, if I ever found myself being accused of a witch, I think I would wait for a moment when I was alone, probably on Death Row, and sing either Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah—and the whole thing, too, every single verse he wrote—or, or possibly and, U2’s Yahweh. They would both fit, though Hallelujah has a certain hopelessness to it… well, not a hopelessness. A futility. Like Johnny Cash singing Hurt, kind of, he’s run his course, “did my best – it wasn’t much,” and now it’s done, and what can you do but sing? Yahweh is more along the lines of “I walked this road, I know it was the wrong one, please show me where to go from here, I’m lost and all I can see is You now, and I’m scared but still full of love.” …or something.

Anyway. With any luck I’ll never be accused of witchcraft, which is just as well because my voice rather sucks. With any luck, I’ll figure out just what it is I want to do, pretty soon. I don’t have the drive or the inspiration that I used to. It’s strange, it seems almost like my heart has closed itself. I can’t touch that part of me, the deep well of something resembling sadness, something touching pain, and something a bit like ecstasy. It was where I reached for words, for the flow behind the words, and sometimes it gave me tears. Now I laugh, and laugh, and laugh, and the worse life gets the harder that laughter comes, the more it hurts, the more I need it. Like someone replaced a drug I needed with some other drug that I’m now addicted to.

The thing is, now I’ve got no direction. I don’t need a career, I don’t need money, I don’t need a nice home and a car. I did fairly well without them for a fair portion of my life, ne? But I do need a direction. I want to just take to the road, live every Anarchist’s dream and one of mine—spend the rest of my life in a cabin in the woods with no one bothering me ever (maybe decades later someone will find it and be really, really confused), or bike around the continent until I find a place to rest. But I also want to help people, in a major way; I also want to write, and to express in words what this life has taught me, because I need to; I also want to sing, but that’s something I can do anyway from a bike. It’s not easy, or at least not as easy as singing normally, but I can and have done it, for miles at a time. Gives your lungs quite the stretch.

And then there’s the song “Lemon,” also by U2. This song makes more sense if you know the back-story, but it’s beautiful even if you don’t. The first time I heard it, it touched my heartstrings in that way that only Bono really can—I mean the rest of the band too, but it’s his lyrics, the rawness beneath the words, kind of, and his voice singing them—and I nearly cried. Maybe I did. I don’t remember now. I remember the video, Mr. MacPhisto, the devil in a rock-star with a microphone, clinging to that last strand of humanity, he doesn’t know why anymore, drifting from the shore… I don’t know how to put it into words. Maybe only Bono can. Maybe death is an easier loss than insanity.

Remind me never to have a family.

Time takes the toll of unwanted bruises on my pride.

So it’s late, too late, and it’s cold, and I’m shaking a little and so, so tired. The day plays over, scene by scene, in my head, what I remember of it. I wish I’d stayed in the mood I started the walk in, cheerful and invincible. Things dragged me down, as they always do—the tension that one out of three doesn’t feel, that helps, the lazy feeling pulls a little more gently, and next thing I’m wondering where my energy went. It’s just the way it is; I wish I had the energy to study for the Spanish exam tomorrow, but such is life. I will not force myself, possibly because I know that won’t end well. I might go through the English texts, but something tells me that the only way I can prepare for that exam is to pray for a miracle. English, of all things! So pathetic, so terrible, I should not be stressing over this.

But anyway the music plays, and it kneads the snarling masses of confusion in my head, leaving me with some kind of calm. My sister claims that I look high when I sing, in too good of a mood. Maybe I am, somehow. Maybe it’s enough, maybe it isn’t. I know there’s no options, sometimes—oh, how I envy the irresponsible in life. I mean, it’s not like I’m the best or the worst or what have you; I am very, very bad at being responsible most of the time, but that doesn’t change the fact that I have responsibilities, ones that I can’t shirk or drop or ignore. I wish I could be cool, relax, forget about it, have a few drinks and maybe a joint or two and let it all go. I wish I could just hang out, chill, have fun. But as hard as I’m laughing, there’s always a hard weight in the back of my mind; as much as I’m willing to let go, I can’t.

It’s why I’ve never punched a few people out, for things they’ve said to or about me; I’ve never gone to a party and gotten wasted; I’ve never hung out and gotten stoned. I can’t. I can’t afford to let go of this weight, it’s what ties me down, it’s what keeps me from falling out of this life. It’s made of a few different things; my past, the guilt that I shouldn’t really even have at this point, my family, things that I shouldn’t worry about anymore or at all, and constant worry about the future. The only place I’ve ever been able to let go is out, far away from this whole world, in the world I know best, between tree trunks and cliffs and mountainsides, and the sky that you can’t see from the streets.

[Who knows? Maybe I’m really not crazy. Maybe it’s all a lie, maybe I’m perfectly fine, but whether it’s real or not doesn’t make it any easier to deal with.]

What I really need is to get away. Not to Sacramento, to an unnamed forest somewhere far enough out that no one will bother looking for me. I’m so fucking sick of this whole thing! I’m sick of politics, I’m sick of anger, I’m sick of guilt! Why am I always so damned guilty about everything? I swear, I can’t fucking say a word about half the shit I want to because I’m afraid to hurt somebody’s fucking feelings, and then to the people I actually give a damn about, I don’t watch my mouth. I’m so sick of laughing when I want to curl up and get away, I’m so sick of wanting to curl up and get away! I’m sick of dealing with four hours of stress and friction in order to live half an hour of laughter. I’m sick of not having the words when I need them, and then they swirl around in my head and when I try to say what I mean, it’s the wrong words and nothing even makes sense.

I want to go somewhere where life is living, where I get by on doing what I need to make the day. I want to go somewhere where it doesn't matter what you think, what he said, what she did, why it's harder today than it was yesterday. I need to work with my hands, to throw half a day's worth of back-breaking labor and see not a paycheck, but something that I needed, a shelter, another wall on my cabin, enough firewood to get me through a few more weeks. I want to go somewhere where life is for the living, not for looking how you're supposed to look.