Infinite Existences
If I was Kerouac, I would move back home with my mother.
If I was Wilde, I’d go on a shopping spree and max out my credit cards.
If I was Thoreau, I’d flee to the woods.
If I was Whitman I’d... Well, I really don’t know what I’d do if I was Whitman.
Needless to say, I am not any of these men, so I will do what I do, and complain out the ass until every picture of the virgin Mary on every tire cover and windshield sticker in South Chicago bleeds from the ears.
What I want isn’t too much to ask I don’t think. I accept I have to have a job. I get it. I have no choice there. I just want one where I show up at whatever time, and then work till whatever time; eight hours, the end. I want to be able to take a lunch without being disturbed. Without dirty looks that I am sitting in here doing nothing. Without guilt. I don’t want to be on call after work hours. I don’t want to have to work weekends. I don’t want to have to give anything extra. I want to come in, do my job and go home. I don’t need to make little work buddies. I don’t need to socialize. I don’t need to participate in monthly birthday cake or have little packets of people feel left out if I don’t stop by and talk to them more often or don’t go to lunch with them.
All the same things I wanted before. Still want them. Still just want to be left the fuck alone. Give me a fucking paycheck and send me on my way. I don’t care about corporate futures. I don’t care about big pictures or thinking outside the box. There is no ’outside the box’. None of these idiots can see it. The box they are thinking outside of is just inside another box that their society-influenced and numbed brains cannot see. A box so vast and incalculably huge that it’s invisible to their eyes.
I don’t want to worry about promotions. I don’t care about bonuses (since I’ve not had one in more years than I can count). I don’t want company picnics. I don’t care about X-mas parties. I don’t give a shit who said what to who or how they said it or when. For the love of the holiest turd to ever be shat, I just want to get from punching in to punching out and then get on with the rest of my misguided life.
I. Don’t. Care. And I really mostly don’t care that I don’t care. All these people out their in their suits and ties and skirts and sensible shoes can live their lives trying to excel at the pointless business endeavors they think define their lives. More power to them in their plight. They can’t see what I see. That they are just as lost and imprisoned as I feel. But they’ve been diluted into thinking that profit margins and monetary values placed on their achievements qualifies the right to a more fulfilling life. But it only qualifies them to gain higher status within an archaic, doomed system that will someday crash in on itself as it always has before countless times throughout the span of history.
I could accept that I’ll never amount to anything if they’d just leave me alone. Don’t expect anything from me. Let me find a place where I fit in the world. Where no one has any expectations and I don’t have to fulfill any. This is my great American dream. To be left the fuck alone to die in peace when the time comes. Still a rat in a cage, but with at least a wheel to run on and fool myself I am getting somewhere. My own wheel... not the wheel the rest of these lab rats run on. My own fucking wheel!
These people are all like the last ones. Like all the ones on the trains and in their cars and at the grocery stores after five. All these self-important twits who think they are contributing to some greater whole. People accusing me of being lazy and misguided who are completely unable to see just how lost they are. I see them as fools the same they see me as a fool. Look at them scurrying to their trains. Talking on their cell phones while applying makeup and driving to get to work because everyone in the 21st Century is so busy. No one at any time ever before in the span of this planet has ever been as busy before. Certainly none busier than some of the women here. No one has ever worked so hard before.
Those fuckers that built the pyramids... lazy pieces of shit compared to these women. Slaves in the great, free America with some fat white guy behind them whipping the shit out of them... nope, they hadn’t a clue what real effort was compared to the crack team of individuals here. I can only imagine the advances in medical science if they trained these people to find a cure for cancer. All disease would be wiped out in 5 months with these Einstein-Assembly machine hybrids they have here. Regular thinkin' machine super computers. Each one of them.
I am not negative. I really am not. I can see as clear as day. Everyone’s lost. Misguided. Misdirected. They believe in nothing of purpose. All as empty as I am. Or maybe more so because I can see the pointlessness. I see it. I’ve opened my eyes to it. Admit to it’s existence. I am not trying to convince myself that the void isn’t there or that it can be filled with the spoils of this monetary orgy they call life.
I can find a median at which to exist here. I can accept, begrudgingly at times, the lot in life I must endure. I can find some small joys in an otherwise despicable world. I can do it all seeing the void. Accepting the void. I don’t think most others can. If they opened their eyes to the void. If they saw the reality of it, they might crumble. They might go insane. Their minds would melt under the extreme pressure of trying to process what to them is incomprehensible.
Here I am no better though. I see all I see and still do not have the ability to achieve a symbiosis with my existence. I’ve only given reason to my state of misery. Nothing more. Reason does not bring about anything. Will does. My will drives me just to get home. To hide in comfortable zones with the least amount of resistance. Where my knowledge brings me enlightenment, any power in it’s presence is extinguished by the simplest of emotions: Fear.
Is there something I am missing here? Some power with I am ignorant to? Something I cannot see simply because I’ve never seen it before? I really do ask myself sometimes what it was Kerouac did. Or how Thoreau thought. How would these great minds that I indelibly and unquestionably consider to be my direct artistic peers get out of the conundrum I constantly find myself in? How would they have lived their lives had they lived in this time, in this mind? Am I the living answer to that question?
Are we all of us the same person? Each of us throughout all of time living the same existence from point ’A’ but upon arrival at point ’B’ each given vast and infinite variables to deal with so that most every life is never quite exactly the same at the end. Each with the same mind? The same possibilities? The same resources? But never the same end. Never the same outcome. And yet always the same person.
Jack Kerouac was an alcoholic drifter. Henry David Thoreau had the money to leave it all and go build a shack in the woods. Wilde was a big homo overextending himself to live according to the status. Looks like I am most likely taking Wilde’s road.
Because I don’t want to excel by the means placed before me does not mean I do not want to excel. I’ve been conditioned to think in the limited ways I am. Sometimes, and I really do believe this, I think my ”mania” is my misdirected drive. It does not know where to channel itself. It does not know what to do. So it festers inside like a bubbling cauldron. It bursts forth like an angry volcano; a tirade here, a rant there, a burst of anger, a feeling of hopelessness, crying from suffocation.
Think of all I could be if I knew what to be. But, I lack the ability to comprehend all my options. *I* am the idiot. I am the dullard, ignorant stupid fool. It’s myself I hate. Not them... it’s me. That is the worst kind of realization to accept. Blame must be placed. I place it on myself rightly. Thus beginning the wild ride of self-pity. Vicious circles. Unhealthy cycles. All the same ending. Right back here, in these situations.
Governed by fear and bored off my ass.
If I was Wilde, I’d go on a shopping spree and max out my credit cards.
If I was Thoreau, I’d flee to the woods.
If I was Whitman I’d... Well, I really don’t know what I’d do if I was Whitman.
Needless to say, I am not any of these men, so I will do what I do, and complain out the ass until every picture of the virgin Mary on every tire cover and windshield sticker in South Chicago bleeds from the ears.
What I want isn’t too much to ask I don’t think. I accept I have to have a job. I get it. I have no choice there. I just want one where I show up at whatever time, and then work till whatever time; eight hours, the end. I want to be able to take a lunch without being disturbed. Without dirty looks that I am sitting in here doing nothing. Without guilt. I don’t want to be on call after work hours. I don’t want to have to work weekends. I don’t want to have to give anything extra. I want to come in, do my job and go home. I don’t need to make little work buddies. I don’t need to socialize. I don’t need to participate in monthly birthday cake or have little packets of people feel left out if I don’t stop by and talk to them more often or don’t go to lunch with them.
All the same things I wanted before. Still want them. Still just want to be left the fuck alone. Give me a fucking paycheck and send me on my way. I don’t care about corporate futures. I don’t care about big pictures or thinking outside the box. There is no ’outside the box’. None of these idiots can see it. The box they are thinking outside of is just inside another box that their society-influenced and numbed brains cannot see. A box so vast and incalculably huge that it’s invisible to their eyes.
I don’t want to worry about promotions. I don’t care about bonuses (since I’ve not had one in more years than I can count). I don’t want company picnics. I don’t care about X-mas parties. I don’t give a shit who said what to who or how they said it or when. For the love of the holiest turd to ever be shat, I just want to get from punching in to punching out and then get on with the rest of my misguided life.
I. Don’t. Care. And I really mostly don’t care that I don’t care. All these people out their in their suits and ties and skirts and sensible shoes can live their lives trying to excel at the pointless business endeavors they think define their lives. More power to them in their plight. They can’t see what I see. That they are just as lost and imprisoned as I feel. But they’ve been diluted into thinking that profit margins and monetary values placed on their achievements qualifies the right to a more fulfilling life. But it only qualifies them to gain higher status within an archaic, doomed system that will someday crash in on itself as it always has before countless times throughout the span of history.
I could accept that I’ll never amount to anything if they’d just leave me alone. Don’t expect anything from me. Let me find a place where I fit in the world. Where no one has any expectations and I don’t have to fulfill any. This is my great American dream. To be left the fuck alone to die in peace when the time comes. Still a rat in a cage, but with at least a wheel to run on and fool myself I am getting somewhere. My own wheel... not the wheel the rest of these lab rats run on. My own fucking wheel!
These people are all like the last ones. Like all the ones on the trains and in their cars and at the grocery stores after five. All these self-important twits who think they are contributing to some greater whole. People accusing me of being lazy and misguided who are completely unable to see just how lost they are. I see them as fools the same they see me as a fool. Look at them scurrying to their trains. Talking on their cell phones while applying makeup and driving to get to work because everyone in the 21st Century is so busy. No one at any time ever before in the span of this planet has ever been as busy before. Certainly none busier than some of the women here. No one has ever worked so hard before.
Those fuckers that built the pyramids... lazy pieces of shit compared to these women. Slaves in the great, free America with some fat white guy behind them whipping the shit out of them... nope, they hadn’t a clue what real effort was compared to the crack team of individuals here. I can only imagine the advances in medical science if they trained these people to find a cure for cancer. All disease would be wiped out in 5 months with these Einstein-Assembly machine hybrids they have here. Regular thinkin' machine super computers. Each one of them.
I am not negative. I really am not. I can see as clear as day. Everyone’s lost. Misguided. Misdirected. They believe in nothing of purpose. All as empty as I am. Or maybe more so because I can see the pointlessness. I see it. I’ve opened my eyes to it. Admit to it’s existence. I am not trying to convince myself that the void isn’t there or that it can be filled with the spoils of this monetary orgy they call life.
I can find a median at which to exist here. I can accept, begrudgingly at times, the lot in life I must endure. I can find some small joys in an otherwise despicable world. I can do it all seeing the void. Accepting the void. I don’t think most others can. If they opened their eyes to the void. If they saw the reality of it, they might crumble. They might go insane. Their minds would melt under the extreme pressure of trying to process what to them is incomprehensible.
Here I am no better though. I see all I see and still do not have the ability to achieve a symbiosis with my existence. I’ve only given reason to my state of misery. Nothing more. Reason does not bring about anything. Will does. My will drives me just to get home. To hide in comfortable zones with the least amount of resistance. Where my knowledge brings me enlightenment, any power in it’s presence is extinguished by the simplest of emotions: Fear.
Is there something I am missing here? Some power with I am ignorant to? Something I cannot see simply because I’ve never seen it before? I really do ask myself sometimes what it was Kerouac did. Or how Thoreau thought. How would these great minds that I indelibly and unquestionably consider to be my direct artistic peers get out of the conundrum I constantly find myself in? How would they have lived their lives had they lived in this time, in this mind? Am I the living answer to that question?
Are we all of us the same person? Each of us throughout all of time living the same existence from point ’A’ but upon arrival at point ’B’ each given vast and infinite variables to deal with so that most every life is never quite exactly the same at the end. Each with the same mind? The same possibilities? The same resources? But never the same end. Never the same outcome. And yet always the same person.
Jack Kerouac was an alcoholic drifter. Henry David Thoreau had the money to leave it all and go build a shack in the woods. Wilde was a big homo overextending himself to live according to the status. Looks like I am most likely taking Wilde’s road.
Because I don’t want to excel by the means placed before me does not mean I do not want to excel. I’ve been conditioned to think in the limited ways I am. Sometimes, and I really do believe this, I think my ”mania” is my misdirected drive. It does not know where to channel itself. It does not know what to do. So it festers inside like a bubbling cauldron. It bursts forth like an angry volcano; a tirade here, a rant there, a burst of anger, a feeling of hopelessness, crying from suffocation.
Think of all I could be if I knew what to be. But, I lack the ability to comprehend all my options. *I* am the idiot. I am the dullard, ignorant stupid fool. It’s myself I hate. Not them... it’s me. That is the worst kind of realization to accept. Blame must be placed. I place it on myself rightly. Thus beginning the wild ride of self-pity. Vicious circles. Unhealthy cycles. All the same ending. Right back here, in these situations.
Governed by fear and bored off my ass.