Wednesday, September 28, 2011

The Value of Hard Times

I just passed the highway sign again: HARD TIMES 30 MILES, PROCEED WITH ANGST AND LOATHING. I’ve been here many times before but the place is perpetually changing, like a soliloquy written by a schizophrenic. Of course I come with the requisite baggage: a 24-pack of self-loathing, a Styrofoam cooler filled with interminable doubt, several aged bottles filled with abandonment and parental injustice, a matched set of antique but functional dueling pistols and a well-rehearsed PowerPoint presentation containing a compelling array of my reasons for making this journey. With all of those plus 3 cases of Pacifico and a sandwich bag filled with “shrooms” I should be able to hang on long enough to reconcile my predicament: trying to find comfort between a rock and a hard place.

As I cruise down the main drag, I see that the town looks pretty much the same as the last time I was here. Battered and bloody women running and screaming through the dusty streets; grown men huddled by the side of the road, boldly weeping into their beards; a distant cacophony of shrill screams and soul-drenching moans that create a bizarre yet compelling libretto that welcomes me back to the place that loves to beat you down.

There is no point searching for friends for you have none here. This is a town fueled by loneliness and despair; heartbreak and frustration. I stop the car, take a seat by a business man with a broken spirit, and begin the process of unloading my baggage. He turns his head as if wanting to ask me a question, but immediately realizes the futility and returns his gaze to the garbage blowing through the street. We sit on the curb, each of us drinking in the bile, filling our lungs with all the rancid catharsis that Hard Times has to offer. For me it is the death of wonder, brought on by the weight of no longer being able to make my way in the world.

A woman in a torn and dirty sweater appears at my side from nowhere, whispering the same phrase: “Why can’t I be loved?” My momentary desire to console her passes quickly as she shuffles away, confronting another despondent old man down the road with the same unanswerable question. Unfortunately, Hard Times is a place filled with questions, not answers; filled with despair not resolution; filled with bitterness not joy.

For me, the inability to find work in spite of diligent effort skewed the context of my life so badly that all that I believed became a question, not an answer; a condition welcomed by the despondency that fills the air like a putrid fog in Hard Times. The struggle to regain stasis in my life eventually wore me down, becoming my reality. I expect the woman wanting love had gone through a similar process. The twisted bodies along the side of the road attested to the fact that accepting Hard Times as your home would eventually kill you. Confronting that reality was one of the main reasons to visit this awful place.

I think we all visit a section of Hard Times during our life. The trick is learning to use the pervasive misery and sadness there to awaken the love and hope that lies dormant inside us. It is not an easy task, often equivalent to slaying a monster with a pebble, but it is possible. For me that night in Hard Times was all about recognizing that the present does not equal the future. That each day I continued to endure might indeed bring me closer to a new vision of my life. One filled with compassion and love, not fraught with frustration and anger.

The struggle against the darkness that exists in Hard Times will always be there, for how can you appreciate the good times if you haven’t sampled the bad? The trick is to remember that the only constant in the universe is change and that humans are incredibly adaptable beings, able to re-create their realities at will. To bring about change, all one has to do is immerse themselves in the paradigm, and there is no place better to do that than crawling through the desperate throngs who fill the dusty streets of Hard Times.

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Oh To Be Ordinary

I thought I'd write just a little tonight about the plight of being too creative, too sensitive and too removed from the status quo. If you spent twenty years with one person how would you feel if he/she never truly understood you? If you found yourself wandering a frontage road that divided the life you should have lived and the one you got stuck with how would you deal with it? Would you run for the hills that held your life's purpose or would you stay the course, do the "right" thing and fulfill your responsibility to someone to whom you would always remain a stranger? Would you let lust drive your destiny? Would you let it drive you insane?

Just like a square peg whittled down to fit into a round hole, those of us who acknowledge the absurdity of maintaining a palsied status quo run the risk of being ostracized by those who would maintain this paltry level of living at any cost. The majority rules that those emotionally confused folks need to squelch their desires and stick to the rules of the game: marriage, career, children and retirement in some state where the sun shines more often than not. Unfortunately, once you commit to the plan, the only exit is leaping from the status quo into loneliness, despair and desperation, or so they want you to believe.

The truck driver who always wanted to paint, the attorney who wanted to write, the waitress who always wanted to dance; they've become commonplace cliches in our modern machine that worships value only in monetary terms. Sure, stardom is idolized - America is after all a cult of personality. But what about all of those unfortunates who lost grasp of their dreams along the way? Where are they to stash their angst created by unfulfilled potential?

Once again I refer to Canada which recognizes the importance the artist brings to its culture and accordingly subsidizes their development. Socialism our status quo yells, quaking at the thought of actually giving government money to someone following a creative path. Artists don't feed the machine, truck drivers do.

Of course, America has no money to subsidize the arts anyway; we are too busy trying to convince the Middle East that we are their friends. We are too busy paying back favors for votes committed. We are too GODDAMNED BUSY GIVING SENATORS FREE HAIRCUTS!

So the next Martha Graham is left to take orders for food at some backstreet burger joint, the next Jackson Pollock is left to drive 18-hours to deliver plumbing parts to Pittsburgh and the next John Updike is left to plea bargain a three-time loser off of death row. And so it goes for the criminally inane.

America does not savor the artist unless they are a commercial success, because then they become a part of the process that drives this imperialist lunacy. America is a country lost in its own complacency. No one dare step out of line since fear rules the day. The status quo has become the symbol for modern-day stoicism. America is drowning in the mundane. Watch any channel on your television for 10 minutes and proof of that claim will become obnoxiously obvious.

America has created a population that worships the status quo, that thinks no further than their credit limit, that equates success to how much money you make, that sees creativity in the familiar, that refuses to challenge their own cultural bias, because they see it all as just one thing: maintaining the status quo... and so the machine rumbles on, using every ounce of energy fed into it, never moving, never evolving, just providing that familiar matrix for which the country needs to survive.