Where do you go when you close your eyes?
When you close your eyes, where do you go? Beneath the layers of dust, dirt, grit, skin, muscle, bone and blood you exist on another level, another place. Internal. External. Mind. Body. Where do you place importance? How do you find a balance?
Can you swim fifty laps? Do you have four degrees? Can you fuck anything that moves? Have you reached an inner tranquility?
Or can’t? Haven’t? Wont?
Does Fear eat at you?
How far along did you get in the funnel before it ended and your life spilled in a hundred pieces? We are pushed, prodded and directed for eighteen years. If we enjoy it, we’re given another four, or eight, or longer. But then, that crucial internal compass may have always pointed North while your external being went South.
Not their problem.
When you spill out of the tunnel of suggested societal idiocicracies heralded daily by Oprah and the six o’clock local news, it’s assumed the pressure put on you to carry that momentum of will keep you in line. On your chosen path.
How often I see that is not the case. Friends living on borrowed wants and goals. Fake struggles for the next wrung of a ladder they’re unable to identify beginning to climb themselves. It’s an uncontrollable slide, not a race for the finish line. No wonder so many fall off in the middle of their life.
One more satellite package, one more horsepower, one last golden plated button on your new jeans.
Obsession over people who were not funneled. A newer tragedy, though taking the place of the catastrophic boredom of previous centuries. The intense need to wear the same socks as your favorite movie actor. Repetitious turrets of witty cartoon dialogue in every social situation. Were our ancestors such programmed and equation balancing individuals? Did they seek out the etchings of Thomas Jefferson’s sex-documents? Were they impressed by John Philip Sousa’s racist interviews?
The clusterfuck is worse when the funnel is clogged. Graduates on their happy way to a mundane life now find themselves spilling through a crack made by some other group of lost souls called the Baby Boomers. Pressure to continue, but nowhere to go. Mistaken for lost individuals who have always been cast aside for finding their direction was all wrong all along. The only difference between the basements ends up being how hard upstream they have to fight.
The American Dream always rearing it’s chiseled hard and sexy unattainable form in a dance beyond your fingertips. It flaunts the capitalist shroud of get rich quick or sing it to stardom while behind you an American Nightmare of cancer, flu’s, gays and terrorism, on a twenty four hour news cycle, pecks away the soft comfort of a failed life. Anything can kill you now, everything is bad for you, but if you die or get cancer, you’ll get your five minutes of fame. Just tweet it.
So tell me, when you close your eyes, where do you go? How high in the sky, how deep in the snow? Is there a different person there? Do you see him slowly fading to a subconscious rage as his needs are unfulfilled? In this closely woven world of technology there’s little time to analyze how hard you’re sprinting towards the wrong end. There’s no room to think in between youtube and the television. There’s no room to argue with the color of the money you make. There’s nothing but alcohol for the boredom of a failed funnel. There’s no price but boredom for a successful one. And if you find yourself able to stop on the slide, shoving your feet into the cracks and holding up the pressure of a world shoving you down, you may be able to see through it all and realize the madness of the whole system. There’s no way to escape, but to accept your fate.
