Scattered Bones: 002
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It’s funny. I’ve never really thought of myself as a suburbanite. But all I really need to do is take a walk around my neighbourhood and see that I’m pretty much just like everybody else in my ‘hood.’ You know, trying to keep my head down, live a relatively quiet life. I have a wife, a couple of kids, a couple of cars, a mortgage and other bullshit to pay for every month. One day is pretty much the same as the next day – eat, work, sleep. Throw in a few distractions – workout, surface the Net, watch some TV, read the paper, socialise with the same friends, make art or whatever, but one day is pretty much the same as the next.
But I suppose when you really look at it, the default program for being human is to try to make every day pretty much the same as the next day. We seem to need that false sense of security that tomorrow is going to happen pretty much on schedule. I guess it’s a psychological survival mechanism. Let me clarify something – to say that all of your days are the same isn’t to imply that your life is boring. You could have the most exciting job in the world, but I bet when you break it down to it’s base elements, you’re pretty much doing the same shit each day and you no doubt fight hard to control your environment so that you feel relatively sure that tomorrow is going to happen more or less the same as it did today.
Back in my younger days, I fancied myself a bit of a Japhy character – you know the dude in Jack Kerouac’s book, The Dharma Bums – “Japhy was considered an eccentric around campus, which is the usual thing for campuses and college people to think whenever a real man appears on the scene – colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middle-class non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness to hear the voice crying in the wilderness, to find the ecstasy of the stars, to find the dark mysterious secret of the origin of faceless wonder-less crapulous civilisation” (The Dharma Bums, 35).
I believed this shit for a while, even tried to live my life counter to the middle-class non-identity until I realised that everything we put a label to, every movement, every philosophy, every belief system pretty much all boils down to the same shit – you are born and then you die and everything in-between is just killing time.
As fucked up as that might sound, it’s actually kind of liberating. It means, I can relax, make up any bullshit I want to believe and carrying on living my life in the same delusional manner as everybody else. You see it doesn’t matter what you believe, you just have to believe in something otherwise you’ll start thinking, ‘what’s the point?’ And then you’re fucked. That’s when the madness starts to creep in and consume you. And who knows what you’ll do then.
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