brain cheese

[chicken_pat_pie]

I feel weird. Like the time has come when I have to make decisions that will shape the rest of my life. Like my convictions feel stronger than ever before and my ideas are ripe like the little apple everyone was politicking over in the bus station in Los Angeles. Like emotions feel profound and I am not sure where I am going with this. I have a desire to work again so as to make money so as I can live in an "apartment" again (or at least give $ to the people who always let me stay with them) and buy food (or at least magic ribbon coffee juice and oatmeal cream pie pizza) and underwear and eyeglasses and a bike (or build one?). At the same time I never want to work at a conventional job again or be a part of a system as ridiculous and gross and fucked up as the capitalist society we are a part of. In some ways I would like to go to the Rainbow Gathering with Lindsay and Penelope, but I really don't want to travel again right now and I realize the only reason I desire to go is to spend time with them. The desire to avoid travel for a while is slightly uncharacteristic, but I feel sort of travelled-out and like it means a lot to me to be in Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor again. When I was gone recently I felt sort of homesick in a way I couldn't exactly understand. I missed a lot of people, but that wasn't the entire reason for my sickness -- I felt the need to return to a certain geographic location (rather, I think, a certain community which is composed of a combination of energy created by the people who live there, the land itself, and other factors which are more difficult to explain). It was similar to how I felt when I lived in Olympia and I knew I had to come back to Michigan but I couldn't explain why to other people in a way that really made sense or accurately reflected my abstract feelings that even I didn't fully understand. Some times you just feel like you need to be somewhere and that is all you can understand at that time and it becomes apparent to you later or perhaps it never does.

My brother is leaving for the Air Force tomorrow and I feel really at odds because I want to support my brother in the decisions he makes and I can't tell him that he is making a bad decision or the wrong decision (and I wouldn't) because I really don't believe in "wrong" or "right" decisions as much as I believe that we all have experiences and humans attempt to organize them in such a way as to ascribe properties or characteristics to them which are entirely subjective according to the belief system of the individual attempting to organize such experiences (also I think that binary ways of thinking are incredibly unhealthy as they don't allow for the complex variety of possibilities which could, and do, exist), but at the same time I am more or less fundamentally opposed in every way to the institution which will be his life for the next few years. I think though, that much of the beauty of life is that there are things which occur that there really is no easy way to think about. Some emotions and situations are incredibly complex and it brings me some joy to think that everything is not simple (as I mentioned before I am opposed to thinking about things in a binary context) and therefore, requires us to attempt to examine them from perspectives which are not neccessarily our "own". I think this keeps our brains exercised. It's just like that old saying:
"Lazy brains grow mold, but strong brains make nice cheese."

or something like that ...