I wrote this late one night a couple of months ago. Obviously at times 'It ain't easy livin' in the city...' Growing up with a lot of undeveloped land to stretch out on, it's easy to feel cooped up living in a small apartment with clomping footsteps above us all the time. Since we moved out of our beautiful house with the psycho (see post from Sept. 1st '05) two summers ago, we've been quite cooped up.
Sometimes you just feel like you have to change your life or you'll go crazy like those people you see on the street, or the lady who screams at you because you accidentally touched her. That's where this piece came from. It's a kind of pseudo-journal entry.
I suppose Samantha and I had both been thinking along the same lines, because the next day the idea came up to go to Central America.
Back when I was riding the bus a lot, I started to notice more and more people talking to themselves, more and more people who seemed completely cut off from the thousands of people around them. More and more dysfunctional. I believe that our society is becoming increasingly dysfunctional, and I could see it potentially happening to us.
-I can’t remember how long it’s been since we’ve been out here on our own, it seems like forever. In another life we lived in the city, we rode the bus or the light rail, or rode our bikes and competed with traffic. I remember we complained about the smell of the car exhaust and how insensitive and downright hostile drivers often were. We never escaped the sound of traffic, even in the dead of night. Semi trucks rolling by, the freeway in the distance like a river only without the soothing qualities.
It seems like someone else’s life, like a movie that we watched that stuck with me, the characters seeming like real people, but not us. People trying to figure out who they are and what they want to get out of life, what the meaning is. People running around in circles, both literally and figuratively. Working hard to try and save money to get a larger place with more room to do more of what they think might help to bring more meaning to their lives. All the while losing more of what it is that makes them who they are.
It’s the kind of movie that we would refer to as a ‘frustration film’ because as an observer you can see what the people in the movie can’t see: that they are making all the wrong decisions and slowly spiraling down the drain. The people in the movie slowly go insane as their connection with the world around them deteriorates. The dreams they had of getting away from it all are slowly forgotten. They lose any sense that they have some control over their environment, the old broken record cliché with no one to give the needle a bump to get things moving again.
They lose any sense of passion they once had. They forget what the feeling of love is, the feeling of sexual pleasure, any feeling at all other than a quiet desperation. They forget how to have relationships with people, everyone in their lives becomes too busy to have the time for others. No one has the energy to do much of anything for fun. They try to lose themselves in television like other, ‘normal’ people. To push that drive for meaning down somewhere where they don’t have to think about it anymore, but it just keeps coming out in bizarre ways. They develop new nervous habits and old ones become more extreme.
He used to find himself playing with a single, long strand of hair wrapped around his two fingers, spinning it in a figure of eight pattern. Never quite knowing where the hair came from, it just having almost magically appeared. Now in addition, he has one wrapped around his tongue and spins that one around inside his mouth as well.
She slowly, methodically picks at a scab on the back of her arm as she watches the people around her. Eventually she peels it off again and begins working on another. She feels around back there for the little imperfections on her skin –the zits or eczema bumps or whatever they are and she tears them off. It takes several months for them to heal because she never leaves them alone.
Everyday they notice more and more people acting erratically, but it only registers in a distant sort of way, the world somehow seems less and less real. In another world it might have some affect on them; to see so many of the people around them talking and laughing and screaming to themselves or jerking their heads or their hands around like they have Turret’s syndrome, but they don’t seem to notice.
The media which is so prominent in their lives with stories of death and destruction, suicide bombings, civilian casualties of endless wars, school and workplace shootings, doesn’t seem to register at all. Those daily stories of tragedy, the lifeblood of the ‘news industry,’ and impossible to avoid hearing, once made their hearts feel like they were breaking over and over again every single day. Now they have become nothing but a sort of background static, there is no affect anymore. When he passes the little old homeless lady he doesn’t think about how she reminds him of his grandma anymore. She puts on the necklace with the little bear track pendant every morning without ever thinking of her tall, handsome grandfather who gave her the necklace.
Alcohol, and prescription drugs provide a sort of permanent dizziness, at times seeming to bring comfort, but really just sort of removing the context. Providing a not quite blissful confusion. The attempt at an artificially induced ignorance only resulting in furthering the distance between their conscious mind and that elusive sense of meaning that they once knew is what is needed to make their lives worth living. Rather than the search for that meaning, the search becomes to find a better distraction from consciousness itself. To find a way to go to work and come home and eat and sleep and do the housework without ever really thinking about anything bigger.
I don’t even remember coming out here, how we got here. I can’t even remember what to call this place other than ‘home.’ It’s as if this is nowhere at all and that’s just the way we like it. A mud hut, a dirt floor, a thatch roof, no glass in the windows.
