...enjoy the consequences...
“Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson-
FIGHT
I wish it were easier, these hard decisions. I am pretty sure I have to start giving up on my dream. Now before you regale me with hope and best wishes, understand I choose this pain not for masochistic pleasure. My fate feels elsewhere. My present feels like prison. Woe isn’t me.
If you have an ear or an eye pointed in my direction you have likely witnessed my un-evolution. I am not a changed man. My character has wrinkles, sure, but my impulse, direction and motivations have held firm on a core of
Have Fun
Be Fun
That’s fun. That’s nice (a curse word as cruel as they come). Playing nice can get you an extra five minutes in the sandbox. A playdate with the neighbor’s twins. Smug smiles from strangers that tell you how good you are. How nice you are.
The world however has been won by raging assholes. Banks own empty houses like a sock pile of poker chips. Barons own the means to disseminated discourse, our ability to meet a meaningful mass determined by their barren black box algorithms. How can I win a game I can’t win?
I change my words and identity. It is as much freedom to be me as to choose not to. Increasingly I am convinced the facade has more rizz. Every job I ever held hands with met me in a mask first.
Say what you will, but I doubt your will would choose JOB if given other options to exist. PLAY is superior. PLAY is also false. We put on a play, to act, and to watch. We turn off the play to go home and to rest.
I have sunk again into a mastery of my misery. There is nowhere I can go that isn’t here. My ancestors warned me that if I played with myself too much I would go blind. And here I am. You can see me as I am written, yet I cannot see you.
There is no way to write in reverse. You can’t output input. And if the argument is reading, I’ll ask why we argue. I don’t give up because of hope. Quitting is uninspiring and hardly heroic. Yet I have proof that I fail. That I might even be a failure. I am a pervert then, because each failure feels like a special achievement. One more win on the road to someday.
Woah isn’t me, though I would like it to be. I want to be woah. Or at least oh well.
“Nothing comes into being without a cause and when all the conditions are created, there is nothing that can prevent the consequence.”
-Dalai Lama-
FLIGHT
I met my grade school buddy for a tour of his two stories. Every room was covered in a blanket ceiling couch fort. We had coffee and baked sugar. The snow stopped and I headed to my family. The roads were wet and ugly with salt so I went somewhere I had never been.
I tracked the cold across the frozen shore of the Mississippi river. Summer tugboats sat frigid and empty, smoke billowed a mile from my eyes. A pair of bald eagles shrieked and fought for a fish stolen from the open ice mouth. I was looking for photos. Something to share with you. My eyes write better than my fingers these days, or at least that is what the numbers say.
The anxiety of knowing where I come from has lessened with time. Nothing I do now or in the future can change the past. This is what I tell myself. It is a lie. The present is nothing if not change in the reflection of what was. My lineage is secure. My relationship to it is not.
A day later and I wheezed through a single track snow trail in the woods on a fat tire bike with my youngest sister’s boyfriend. He brought along a buddy who eats minerals from a bag. At multiple points I considered quitting. Turning around to the quickest path home and accepting that I had had enough. My fingers burned. My mind wandered. My toes numbed.
With hope I let myself continue. I breathed secret agent air, ten second inhales, ingesting the empty quiet crunch of rubber on white sand. I finished and later made chili for the football game, watching some shaggy labradoodle steal cheese bowls from the counter.
I fell asleep watching silently a sequel about time machines. You can go back again, I thought. You can go back again and again and again. And then I came back to where I am now. Not where I am from, but where I am from again.
I wish it were easier, these hard decisions.
With hope I let myself continue.
“Glory ought to be the consequence, not the motive of our actions.”
-Pliny the Younger-
…thanks to & for your help thinking about and putting together this piece…it was not of no consequence…
You capture such beauty with your phone. And I disagree—your words are prettier and more meaningful than your photos.
Man, I loved this one. Fun has never been high enough on my priority list. And nice has prob been too high. I’m a fiend for fight and flight in humans. So much good to think about in this post.
And the pics, as always, help me slow down in all the right ways. Blown away you take all those with your phone. Keep bringing em! 👊