and fret for your car. It's a bull-shit, three-ring Circus sideshow of freaks"
I've been listening to a lot of Tool lately and appreciating them more than ever. Old Tool. I think one really falls in love with the articulate anger of this band's music and lyrics and Maynard's strangely soothing voice when one xhas hit the wall as far as being fed up with "normal" society. My head feels bloody from bumping myself up against it.
I realized tonight walking the city streets watching all the glittering assholes out for their Friday night insipid drinking-touting-mating-dance routine, that the only people sharing the streets with me toward whom I didn't feel immediate animosity, were the abject, the desolate, the lost, forlorn, homeless people also out and about tonight. My favorite group of people I've interacted with in large numbers has without a single doubt been my students at the college inside San Quentin to whom I taught Philosophy. Granted, inmates who are interested in taking a college Philosophy class are naturally an unlikely cross section of people. But what I appreciated was their history of rebellion against what's conventionally accepted in society (though, unfortunately for many of them, they were simply going along with the only actions that would enable them to be accepted, and that's what landed them here - mostly having to do with gangs), coupled with their current sense of determined retribution - whether that retribution was to be given to the world or to themselves (in most cases, it was a matter of them having the desire to redeem themselves and acquiesce to the world, realizing what was worth having in it), their tremendous gratitude, their genuine curiosity about this convention of a 'college education'. It's okay in my book to have a desire to embrace the 'normal' as long as you've been on the other side, experiencing, making mistakes, dying, regretting, learning. There were so many other things about these individuals that I appreciated, not just as a population to work with but as human beings, a specific subculture of human beings who took 'ordinary' life, conventions, values, standards, practices with a grain of salt at the same time as they took none of it for granted - tremendously grateful to get whatever of it they could.
I have been struggling lately with my problem of being interested in too many things, having too many possible avenues down which I might start looking for different, more fulfilling work (vocation). Struggling is a tremendous understatement. I hit the wall the day I started, and I've been knocking my head against it every day. If I'm going to extend the metaphor to my emotional state in response - the blood is running down my face, and the skin on my forehead is meaty and raw. The person who gets to see the most of the results of this - my complaints, my frustration, my un-channeled need to create and dream gone so awry that I'm not even a pleasure to be around to myself anymore is the one person with whom I want to share the best of me, especially because in return for all this bullshit I dish out, he takes ridiculously good care of me. And at the end of the day when my head has been filled with receipts, checks, taxes, forms, spreadsheets, budgets, policies, ledgers, balances, payroll calculations - in essence, aside from things like torture in Baba Amr or words out of Rush Limbaugh's mouth, to me, some of the most unpleasant things a person with even the smallest need to save room for imagining and dreaming can experience. Not because they are so awful in and of themselves - they're a part of life for anyone living today - but because they inspire no creativity, no inspiring thoughts, no dreams. Where if I could choose between never being able to freely associate beautiful images, words, concepts, dreamscapes again, and starving to death, I would dream and imagine and create until catabolysis robbed the last fiber of tissue from my last vital organ. My best has been absent for a good while now, and more tired than I am of the actual work - a recent acquisition since being committed romantically and nuptially - is the fact that at the end of the day, after all the receipts, checks,forms, spreadsheets, budgets, policies, ledgers, balances, payroll calculations, I am spiritually, psychologically, and (weirdly enough since I sit at a desk all day) physically drained of the ability to do almost any care-taking. I can't stand it.
But in between all the frustration and anger tonight, and the much finer feeling of having just worked my body very hard, strained and sweated, and had a long walk home to alchemize and breathe in the night air, and AEnema lullabying all of it - I caught a glimpse of something, a sense of direction. I hate convention and I hate normalcy and the average (I'm mostly talking about culture here, Western culture, people in America in large groups) more than a lot of things (which is why I love Nietzsche so much), and more than I heretofore realized until I've recently become more exposed to it, which seems to have happened just by virtue of being an adult. I am going to look for a way to work in an environment where I am surrounded by people who are not that, who have lived hard, have a sense of what they want and don't want, and hope that maybe I have something to give them. Here's to my new sense of direction.
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