Just That and Nothing More

In my trolling across the psychological minefield that is the internet, I spend a fair amount of time observing the people I know, sort of know, hardly know and don't really know at all through the windows of the Facebook madhouse. In short time I have managed to run across a good selection of friends - some of my actual, no bullshit, would trust with my life friends. I am talking about people I hadn't spoken with or heard from in years. It's a mindfuck to see them all grown up and making it happen. I am pretty damn grateful for that element of the FB universe. And then I have also managed to at least find a small measure of amusement from reacquainting myself with people I have known for many years but who have somehow devolved into full-blown versions of their more annoying selves. We all know the guy that drove us mad up to the point at which we decided it was over and walked away, never looking back. These are people I don't really need in my life. I still care for them, wish them well, but ultimately would be happiest knowing they just pissed right off and went away, back to their reactionary Christian nightmare stories replete with sanctimonious badgering. These are the people who get back in touch with you only to point their fingers in judgment because you don't "know god," or, look down at you (even though you didn't ask) because you don't think abortion in any form is murder, and so on ...

To be perfectly frank - fuck those people. I don't need this noise clouding up the already filthy windshield I peer through on my drive through this baffling rollercoaster of a life.

So, lately I have been thinking about mortality in a specific way. I say it is specific because saying that I think about mortality in general is like saying I eat food. I'm an eater, It's pretty prevalent. What has been on my mind lately is the mortality of the people I have grown up with, the people in my generation, I guess, for lack of a better term. I know the time anyone has is limited, so it doesn't take a mathematician to figure out that it won't be long before some of us start running out of time. Yes, I already know people who met untimely ends, but I'm just saying, we're getting fatter, grayer, uglier and sicker, and it all catches up to us in time. I know guys who are way beyond morbidly obese, these are the ticking time-bombs. These are the guys you see in a picture and think, "Wow, this guy has one foot in the grave." But then again, he might outlive me. I might keel over from an asymptomatic heart condition, so it's a spin of the roulette wheel when you get right down to it.

I think it's funny how you see yourself a certain way as a teenager, and in my case try really hard to envision what sort of a man I will make when I grow up. Well, young me, I am here to tell you the news is good and it is not so good. For all the time I spent worrying about losing my ideals, fantasizing about being a 40 year old with snap, still retaining my bite, I now know I had nothing to fear. I am as obnoxious and suspicious and uncompromising with my inner life as I was then, if not more. What I hadn't accounted for, however, was the fact that life sort of creeps up on you, and that for me anyway, I am still no closer to knowing what I want to be than I was then. And that is a problem because I am something, and that something is what I am in the stead of being something focused and targeted, goal-oriented and all that sexy stuff. What I am is not sexy. But perhaps defining what I have become is better put by telling you what I am not.

Thanks to Facebook again I have stumbled across a cross-segment of my youth that is comprised of the yearbook idols. These were the guys who played football, dated all the prettyish cheerleader types, made great grades despite having almost no comprehension of what it was they were acing, went to the best schools because it was expected of their world, and spent an inordinate amount of high school time trying to pick fights with guys like me whenever I was alone and they were at least two guys deep. You know them, they are the fratboy, jock contingent. Mooks. Date rapists. And unless you yourself were one of them, there's a fair chance you hated most of them as much as I did. And so there they were, splayed all over Facebook, plump in that well-fed sort of American way. They clearly survived the economic downturn quite handily. Their wives and girlfriends all look exactly like the girls they dated back then.

I would love to tell you that I don't hold a grudge against any of them, and that it was simply a part of the adolescent experience. I would like to tell you that everyone had a role to play in high school, and that had I wanted into that life I could had reached out and Carpe Diem-ed that motherfucker, but I know better. Things don't work like that. Truth is, I sincerely hope that they are as miserable as they made the rest of us. I hope that they are, at the end of the day, as empty inside as they have always presented themselves to be. I would like to hope that their skewing of the teenaged pendulum has always been a reflection of their hollowness.

Thing is, all of that is wrong.

They're just people. Plain and simple. And they have lives and problems and maybe even a worry or two that isn't a reflection of their need for a new haircut, or a curious nagging that they should have used a rubber in the car after the club last night. What they are doing is living the life that was laid down before them by the world, by our preconceptions, and by a world of tradition and history, all tailor-made to breed people like them to run this town, and to make sure that people like me, people who are self-aware, semi-intelligent, and just cynical enough to keep both eyes open, will always remain on the outside, will always remain utterly uncomfortable in a role that finds me leading the way when all I see is a world of people who need to learn to lead themselves, without outside direction, and eventually show us all what it is that really makes us worth something.

I come off as hopelessly negative, trust me, I get that a lot; but it's a mistake. Or maybe it's just subterfuge perpetrated at the hands of a man who always distrusts a smile until he fully realizes the motivation behind it. I don't fuel the tank with doubt, I fuel the fucking tank with art and passion. That is first and that is for all time. What keeps my head from misting the walls is the awareness of beauty, the aching and crippling beauty. It's still there. Beyond my growing waist, it's still there, beyond my dimming spark, my Sisyphian battle against fear, it is there - I can still see it. So yeah, I am angry to think that the children of privilege who seemed to be handed a world that was crafted to keep them in charge and the rest of us on the march are shitting on their progeny and pushing it all forward, but what else should I expect? I don't look to the government for direction, don't look to the ornate diversion of god - the ultimate joke, don't look towards huge numbers of pliant, fear-stricken followers in order to find meaning in life. I look to artists, authors, philosophers, scientists, anthropologists, archeologists, and musicians. And at the end of the day I look at my children and I am filled with fear for what I have given for them to inherit, fear for the future of this very sick world, guilt that I have ripped their family apart much in the way that my father did before me, guilt that I am so very poorly equipped to handle all the little things that go into insuring that they will be strong, that they will say "Fuck you!" to those guys who feel so entitled to tell us that we build this world for them to enjoy, so that they can play and breed and work and fuck and smile and cry and live and thrive and one day die ... all at our expense.

Sometimes I just wonder, I just wonder is all.