Nowheresville!

Did you really want to pick up garbage when you reached your majority or become a comptroller at a bobby pin factory? Or land the coveted assistant manager job at The Fashion Bug? If you could have done anything in the world, anything at all what would that have been? A poet, writer, musician, foreign correspondent, astronaut, sculptor?  Maybe you could have had a life in porn? I’m not talking a star turn perhaps, but perhaps the anonymous caber in the back knocking boots with some hard belly-ed little bi-chick was not out of your skill set. But no, you can’t stay because you have to get up at 5am and get down to the Toot and Scoot and make  coffee and donuts for the rest of the sad sacks.

How did it come to pass that instead of a life’s work of resonance and depth you ended up working the day watch out of Nowheresville? Sadly, 99% of us cannot make this claim to the contrary that of doing exactly what we were put on earth to do, to use and maximize our complete talents, to essentially realize our authentic selves as anything other than being a slave to a wage. It is a sad, but certainly a true statement of affairs that the vast majority of us work jobs of numbing indifference, pacify these failed dreams with two weeks of vacation then spend the next year paying off those two weeks and only to happy to rinse and repeat…again and again.

But without these blunted souls this culture couldn’t survive. That is the great conceit. The arbiters of the public trust, the religious leaders, the captains of industry and the politicians define the culture only in terms that benefits each particular monolith. The religious leaders protect their investment by venerating itself as indispensable to the happiness of the culture. The corporation positions itself as indispensable to the welfare of the system. The politicians fuse both into a seamless daisy chain.

Out of this amalgam a rigidly defined hero system emerges and only prescribed behaviors enjoy the benefits and anything out of the purview of the three-headed monster is looked at with a disapproving eye. Who’s to blame? Who is the last line of defense against a life of quiet supplication?

In my opinion parenting is the culprit, otherwise how do you explain so many men spending their years weeding and feeding, as if dutifully doing so provides entry into some sort of suburban Valhalla.

Once his lawn was perfect Harold began getting invited to the best parties in the subdivision.

 Parents are the first and last bulwarks. If you have children your only mission is to imbue them with a sense of ultimate possibility and to cast aside your own foibles, shortcomings and prejudices. Permit this little flower, entrusted to you by the mystery of the cosmos, to reach for the sun otherwise a paper hat is probably in their futures or maybe you just have a donut addiction and are willing to sacrifice one child for the sake of your deep fried Jones. Children are the future. But it’s a shame parents have to raise them.

We live in a time that could use a few more poets. I mean, how many more middle management cocksuckers does a free country really need?