What the hell is the point. Is it possible to be a furious romantic? I would like to believe so. That is beside the point. My apologies, romanticism is entirely beside the point.
With the onset of a new year and the end of an old one it is clear that it is, barring catastrophic failure, inevitable that you will be one year older. And it is a little disappointing. A little disappointing and a lot of frustrating. What is one more year?
You look at your car and it needs work. You listen to your body and it needs work. You hear your head and it needs work. One more year on the odometers and everything needs work to make it run better than it does, but never as good as it did when it was built. You look at your insurance and you go through the hundreds of lines of your policies and nothing is actually covered. You are essentially paying for a card that says you cannot be put in jail for leaving your home because you have paid into a pool that says you acknowledge that if anything happens to your person or your property you are screwed and if you do anything to anyone else or their property with your person or your property to damage them in any way you are more than likely screwed. These things are difficult to look at and absorb and be okay with. What the hell is the point?
I think about how many ways so many junctures could have gone differently all the way back to my birth and hate and rage simmer a sideways glance beneath a rolling boil. A nudge here, a hand there, a push here, tire screeching stop there.
I think about how many ways so many junctures could have gone differently all the way back to my birth and hate and rage simmer a sideways glance beneath a rolling boil. A nudge here, a hand there, a push here, tire screeching stop there.
Everyone has a ten year head start on you. That is not going to change. There is no way to somehow work so hard that the gap goes away. Wherever you go, whatever you get up to, everyone else living marginally productively will always be at least ten years ahead of you from a developmental stand point. If you want the insurance that is more than a "please do not put me in jail for being alive and mobile" card you will have to work twice as hard and twice as long and essentially kill yourself to get it anyway. What the hell is the point? Go back to school and get a better job and then extend your retardation to twenty five years to pay everything back for a degree you do not want and a career that will probably end with your body dangling from a rope because you could afford a gun, but forgot to budget for ammunition. To top off your glass, the time spent at home learning to be an adult was spent largely learning how to avoid pain and punishment heaped out by the bucket for things that beg explanation to this day, and so you are essentially 12 when you should be 30 years old.
The mathematics are overwhelming. Standing back from the numbers it takes on the shape of a massive impact crater you landed in America inside, the walls high enough to block out the time of day from dawn to 11 A.M. and 2 P.M. to night, with you at its center with a sun dial wondering why people are phoning you at night when in reality the suns been up for 6 hours with no clue otherwise. A hurricane seen from the bottom of a well.
Staying focused is not easy. Time continues to multiply. You do not. It is an effort and choice and a way of life to maintain focus. How simple and easy to quit. Quit is too strong a word. How simple and easy to decline engagement.
Problematic situations. Unsolvable and unreasonable problems will remain so and perhaps, in many cases, get worse over time and you are only responsible for you. Time will keep doing its thing regardless of you and when your focus, you, divided by time approaches zero, you are failing. You are dying faster than you should be. Faster than you have any right to be. You are committing suicide and that is never acceptable for reasons I do not need to go into here. Focus will save your life, whatever value you place on it. Stay away from zero and, if you can, stay as far away from zero as you can.
Forget everyone else. Forget your starting point. Acknowledge the nature of your sun dial, the make up of your world, and the existence of a map beyond your own. Without a balance of forgetfulness and presence, what the hell is the point?
Do not spend all of yourself trying to forget and do not spend all of yourself trying to be present in a world that is not yours. Both roads amount to declining engagement.
Ten years from now I will be 40. I will, in all likelihood, be driving the same car. I will live in the same city. I may own a house or still be renting an apartment. I will have health insurance that does nothing for me beyond an occasional check up. I will probably have all of my teeth. I will have a few friends and a lot of people I know or can say I have met or worked with. I will still enjoy fishing. The lumbar portion of my spine and my hip will still give me problems on extremely cold days or humid days or days when the air pressure or humidity is not right for me. I will still be romantic and ornery and searching for interfaces. Time will have multiplied.
Keeping the fire that spawned my consciousness, my awareness that I am different, my awareness of the world outside and the world inside, is not easy and will become a stiffer challenge as the people I know have their children and families and connections.
In the backwoods of civilization, the margin(?), the nights are very long. There are things and beings and people back there in the darkness, myself occasionally among them, that fire keeps at bay. Tending the fire and humming songs to us to stay awake, you can hear them, smell them, sometimes see them, drawing near the wavering circle to see if you are asleep yet. Ten years from now I will still go out during the day to gather more wood, bits of jetsam, refuse natural and not, to keep the fire burning through the night and the days when the sun refuses to rise and the off chance of eclipse.
I know I am not going to magically get better. I know I am not going to boot strap myself to prosperity. I will have a greater distaste for company. A more combative spirit. As you grow older in the wild, the things you fear grow older and more capable too. What the hell is the point?
The point is you. The point is decay is inevitable. The point is you have lived a scant 20% of your entire life under what can be deemed more freedom to explore the world, embrace yourself, and see without blinders or taint or outside in corruption than you have ever known. Do not be swift to let your fire die. The only thing better than eating is an opportunity to eat you alive. Time will not change course. Debts will not evaporate. Closeness cannot be manufactured or faked. The people and places you know now are not the extent of everything you will or may know.
Stay focused. Remain passionate. Sing your songs. Love nature and all that it has to offer. This thing called you is far from over. You say you want to make a map? I present to you the wilderness.
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