I don't want anything. Arrange this: I don't want money or children or a large television or regular home-cooked meals or reliable transportation or a bed or health insurance or a mailing address or easy answers or the wind at my back. I'm starting to not even care if she thinks about me anymore, or if I'll ever feel warmth in bed beside me, or if I'll ever sleep 8 hours, or if I can bite my tongue through the next million social awkwardnesses, or if I'll maintain my health, or if I'll ever have a night off to stare at the moon, or if anyone wants to read my work. I don't believe in god, "spiritualism", the family unit, the concept of America, liberalism/conservatism, globo-gym fitness, blind philanthropy, the War on ___________ , Hemingway, or corporate consumerism. I haven't purchased anything but food, books, gas, and intoxicants in months. I haven't seen a TV on inside my house in recent memory. I have no plans for anything but homework and work and writing and the occasional coma-like inebriation. I have a knee-high stack of books next to my bed to be read before the summer. I have 82 sprawling days of sweating over riots in places I'll never visit before I see anyone worth leaving my house for. I've got a half-dozen ideas for short-stories that will only be coaxed out onto the page with lean meals, coffee and THC. I have calluses in the palms of my hands that weep pus some mornings, I've developed exercise-induced asthma, gastronomic distress and as many niche aches as your average coal miner. I sleep on my floor because somehow the discomfort comforts me.
And the moral of this is, the more things that I give up, the happier I become. And it doesn't come from cautious meditation after a long cluttered day. Not the forceful forgetting of life. It comes from ruthlessly excising complications, repudiating the patterns your peers and elders fall into, deliberating over your next steps with a scalpel and a spliff. Carefully whittling your concerns down to the few fatal elements that matter. Trim this life to the very second in front of you, rolling out like an epoch into the next.
1 comments:
Brad,
First, I applaud your effort. I stand in amazement at your dedication to your goals tot he exclusion of everything else, even "normal" creature comforts.
But it also worries me. Maybe this is due to me not knowing your true limits, and just being ignorant. If that's true, then no need to read the rest of this. Just keep on keeping on, heading towards the goal.
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If you're still reading, then know I'm concerned. The way you describe some of the symptoms of your way of life, it sounds like you're going on towards your goal at a speed that is slowly shaking you apart. If that's what's needed, then proceed full-on, with my blessing. But remember this(I might be presuming just saying this, and if I am, again, my apologies): "A fanatic is someone who redoubles their efforts while losing sight of the goal."
You're definitely on the right track, just remember, while walking the razor-thin line that you are, it's easy to fall.
Either way, I hope that you accomplish your goals, and come out whole on the other side.
Namaste,
Gary
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