In search of a one-sided game we keep flipping around in circles. Trying to have one without the other. Pretending or hoping there is purpose in it all. Hard work to produce excess only to overdo it and get back to the work. We want our weekends, only to piss them away with mindless meandering that drives us back to our work week. We want our money but do not know how to spend it. We know the chase but have no idea what we catch. So we store it away, save it in banks, park it in garages, move on to further quest. We want the fog to roll in but also to part ways when we want to see the views. Consuming more and more we become drunk on our own excess, on our own thoughts, foods and drinks. We are all Rome and we are all falling.
Is the answer less choice? Less things? Perhaps a century ago it was like this. We had our place, our position, our destiny was more rigid. Now our choices lay ahead of us in a myriad of moments whether on tv, in the shops, in our own neighborhoods or within our language. We are left to our own to figure out the direction we will head off, each mans destination granted like a blank piece of paper with no assignment from the teacher. Gender-neutral, stay at home dads, unscripted television, hair-rollers in public, meterosexuals and an endless mix of mankind unleashed onto the earth. Oh our poor earth.
I watched a man yelling at a tool this morning. A broken hammer lay before him and he was cursing it, his wife looking at him foolishly. A dog barked in the background somewhere and I was pulled out of the moment. I looked down at the shoes I was wearing, caught off guard I saw the looker who was looking. I say myself for a moment in all the lunacy of it all, like a tree falling in a forest when you are nearby I saw the moment for what it was, for what it wasn’t, a moment of babble, of dislocated people and objects spinning on a rock somewhere in space during some season or time that something to someone at some specific time. I dug my hands into my pockets and slowly counted the objects i held and felt assured i was fine.