I Don't Know, Man

It's difficult not to get sucked into a way of thinking that spirals out of control.  When you consider how many of your lines of thinking, projected outward through time, end with a force quit the entire prospect of a future or futures gets dim.  When you consider how many of your avenues end with the phrase "I try not to think about it."

Five years from now, I will still be working for peanuts.  What's the point?  Why bother setting goals at all?  The ones that are attainable are so near and so small they mean next to nothing beside your peers.  Change you can deem actionable is so incremental from outside perspectives as to appear to be no change at all.  Five years from now you'll be able to afford to go out and socialize twice a month instead of once a month.

Life up to now has been heavily geared toward learning how to do more with less.  Learning to deal with scraps and put pieces and parts together to make whole and useful things from what others discard.  Learning to maximize and squeeze potential out of every little thing you find and adopt and consume.  Will you ever get your degree?  By the time you do, will you be able to do anything with it, twenty years behind the curve?  What are your useful skills?  "I can turn a pretty good wrench.  I am terrified of crowds.  I sometimes am paralyzed with depression.  I've been told I cook pretty good chicken.  I don't know, I try not to think about it."

The way of life I am capable of sustaining is far afield of most folks.  Even if I were to "settle down" the undeniable and stark contrast between myself and the environments that have held sway in my engineering and make up will be more than enough to strain just about any relationship to a breaking point, given time.  Love can only cover and suture so many fissures and canyons before a lover will realize my planet is not capable of supporting new life.  So are we protracting our own death?  Killing time and energy and spinning entropy into something beautiful enough that our decades long throes to come can at least bring some light and warm some hearts before it sputters out as the parts steadily fail beyond repair?  "I don't know."

A reminder that you've worked so many years for freedom.  While you are freer than you've ever been, you are still inside the compound.  You still have to trick yourself into believing to keep on running.  Perhaps adopt a belief system or religion.  Not too fast or too far lest you ram headfirst into the bars.  Sitting cross legged, picking at the grass beside the river and skipping a stone now and then, the undeniable scent of wrought iron creeps into the wind and you know the bars are there if you bring yourself to focus your eyes just inside the horizon's line.  I try not to think about it. You've gotten out of the cell and into the yard outside of the yard where you're allowed to roam.  You've earned visitation.  A meal card for better food.  The compound is vast.  I try not to think about it, but I cannot forget.




/// Phantogram - "Running From the Cops"  staring into a still lake of bass