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(Qalyn... Warning: This is going to come off a lot bitchier than I intend. Please have patience. Take with a grain of salt. Take with the whole box of salt, if it helps.)
And here I am, born and bred to the Big City, pining for a simpler (cheaper) life in the burbs. The cosmopolitan life -- especially the scenier parts -- is full of deadbeats, liars, cads, mountebanks, doglickers, gladhanders, and other uninspiring types. By all means come here (raise our rent) but don't expect it to fulfill you. Don't even expect to like it. It's easy nowhere -- but easy is overrated, as my algebra teacher keeps telling me. If it wasn't hard to get, it wasn't an achievement. Everything will be different but you. You'll be the same. Where you are is the easy part. You are the hard part.
Sure the air is nice and cleaner out here, but there's no fucking sidewalks. Everybody looks at me strangely for not having a car... and actually deigning to walk, and nearly getting sideswiped by gigantic SUVs.
I grew up in D.C., and various cities up and down the east coast. I'm no stranger to living in a city, I'm just stuck here, now.
And, uh, I like who I am. Just because I don't like where I've ended up and somewhat despair over the stupidity of it all doesn't mean that I have some gigantic hole in my soul that I expect to have filled by living in a city.
I'm sure your point must be that if I can be fulfilled in a city, why can't I be fulfilled in a suburb? No matter where you go, there you are. I'm sure political prisoners probably inspire people just as much from their cages, but don't you think they'd feel better being outside them, and able to do their life's work? No, I'm not being histrionic, and yes, this place is a sleepy, uninspiring shrinkwrapped town. Whatever fun I have here, I bring myself.
I think you're wrong about people. They want to help, they want you to be happy, they just don't know how to have the impact they'd like. They don't understand why you can't thrive in a lifestyle that's so easy to thrive in. My mother had a boyfriend when I was young who would tell me, when I cried, "Cheer up, kid, you could've been born in Vietnam." It scares them when you despise what they value. For whatever reason -- I can think of several -- they don't really grok that you mean something different by "thrive" than they do.
I'm not wrong about people. I'm one of them, and I think I have some insight. I don't think my happiness is at all integral to theirs. There's the whole schadenfreude thing that goes on amongst the people I know, and back when I arrived in the urban part of this state, pink of cheek, I thought the derision and taking joy in other's pain was something that "cool people" did, and I realised with some discomfort that I could never be kool like dat.
No, I don't think people give a flying fuck over whether or not I "thrive", so much as I steam their latte they way they want, show up on time for my shift, take out the garbage, don't talk to them about any of that "weird shit" I read, don't walk where their SUV is trying to drive, and listen to them tell me just how much better I'd feel if I were to march to the same rhythm, and any pain or discomfort or loneliness I'm experiencing is because I'm not doing it their way.
I know this has the potential to sound adolescent, but I didn't go through this when I was a teenager, and I've never been as stuck as a kid as I am right now, at thirty, feeling the potential of What Might Yet Be poking me from under the skin.
I look back on my own darker periods and I'm astonished at how gauzy-thin they were. Yet the gauze is always right near my hand -- I can put it over my face any time. I remember how happiness seemed like a gauze then, a gauze in front of the lens that blurs out any unsightly blemishes. I'm neither happy nor unhappy right now, too busy trying to keep afloat in unfamiliar circumstances. These are transitory states. Not meaningless, but empty and NOT YOU. The rockstar, &c. is not you. Fuck it, work at WalMart. Rock the WalMart. Make it yours.
That's probably the part of your response that I like the best: Rock the WalMart. (An aside: I don't actually work at a WalMart. The original statement was something along the lines of "This is the kind of future that can be expected of someone like you, someone with your background, someone of your race, someone of your caste and financial status.") When someone throws their money at me and barks an order, I often think WW_D, and fill in the blanks with more modern people:
What Would Frida Kahlo Do? (If forced to work in a WalMart, people would only see her as a semi-crippled Latina that needed to "learn to speak Amurrikin better".)
What Would Abbie Hoffman Do?
What Would Grant Morrison Do?
What Would ::aphonia:: do? Whatever was necessary to keep these people from killing her spirit.
I'll close with some selected lyrics that I think are applicable, from Starving in the Belly of a Whale, off of Tom Waits's most recent, Blood Money:
(deleted to conserve bandwidth)
I've chosen to take this as an invitation and as fair warning, but not as discouragement. Come dance. The tune is terrible, but it's not bad, y'know? More like fearsome. Hard. Like you.
Good Ol' Tom. I liked "Grapefruit Moon".
Pax,
::aphonia:: |
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