To be vulnerable is also to be open to learning. But how much of this learning do I need? How much of it is going to come in handy when my last breaths are fighting my body for freedom? Where is the balance? Do I absorb this information merely for the sake of earning a living? Where’s the depth? Isn’t it what I always swore against?
Too many questions…you think? Welcome to my head. Self-judging, cynical, critical, negative, optimistic, pompous, narcissistic, deep, shallow and so much more. There’s new information whizzing past me by the second. People know stuff. I don’t. The need to catch up is killing a lot of what I thought would never leave me. And still I stand with a net trying to catch whatever sticks. There’s no end to information and knowledge; college is playing its part in making me realize this. But how much of it do I really need?
This is where you end a paragraph. These are the two words that stick together the best. This booger-picking abomination is the agricultural minister. This one’s not. There so much to know and no time to figure out what’s unnecessary. So much for self-actualization. Here I am, a stereotypical young man looking to find the meaning of a lot of things. The phosphorescent glow in the sky assures me that my heart is in the right place. The animated professor lets me know that my head is not. But my head is in my heart. And I don’t give a shit about the shapeshifting list of union ministers.
I thought I had my centre in music. I thought my roots lay buried in poetry. I even assumed that I would be a world-changing naturalist someday. I pick up my guitar and I’m twenty years older than the kid on You Tube who plays the same song. I write and I sound like donkey crap. I try to meditate and I land up wondering when is the best time to light up the next smoke.
I’m drunk alright. But at least I’m thinking straight. I understand the miniscule significance I owe to mankind and I’m fulfilling it with gusto. “Accepting defeat” some would say. And they wouldn’t be wrong. There are the high ups and the low downs. Welcome to the world of the no ones in the nowhere. Welcome to someone who struggles to drop the cliché. It makes him money doesn’t it?
So I feed the monster. I allow my deceptive conformism to ramble on.
I ramble on asking if I’m way too vulnerable. Too open to learning perhaps. Where is the balance? Where is the definition? Where’s the frickin individuality? And I call myself a writer. Someone who is supposed to be intellectually superior. The objective spectator. Sadly, I suffer from a nervous neuroticism that can only be equated to an acid junkie. So I would like to quote one James Maynard Keenan and his story of an acid junkie with similar tribulations
Strapped down my bed. Feet cold and eyes red.
I’m out my head. Am I alive, am I dead
Can’t remember what they said
God Damn shit the bed.
