Romantics

     The purpose of this blog is to question and explain one way in which I romanticize something unconventional.  I believe a fair number of us can relate to this notion, and I would like to hear people share how or how they do not relate. 

Here is mine:

     The sweet sidewalk ahead of my path calls out to my existence in an almost frightening ringing.  I reach out my hands, pampered with lotions, manicures, anti-bacterial soap, and clean water, in the 21^st century, to those of my ancestral nomads.  I envy their simplicity and their assumed ignorance of such complex topics as the meaning of life.  I am able to flex my back ankle, extend my leg, and plant heel to toe further than my poor outstretched arms reach.  In this simple motion that the machine of my body is able to carry out with ease, I feel connected to my roots.  I repeat this complex act multiple times somewhat unconsciously to get to a destination.  Ah, but in this particular age, I am able to do so not with the purpose of the end, but with the exciting benefit of the means.  As a participator in the modern age, I am among millions who enact this motion not to find more food, more shelter, or to find safety from something that lays behind me; but for pleasure.  We walk around for pleasure.  I can hear the sarcastic laughs of those 10,000 years before me when I state this notion of present life.  This natural motion that is necessary for ordinary means of mobilizing oneself in daily circumstances provides an outlet, or a sanctuary to find some kind of clarity of thought.  Each person identifies more with one way or another of finding this noise-cancelation process; whether it is a coffee shop, a quiet sitting on one’s 20^th story balcony, or a lay down on a hammock of strings near the ocean side.  My particular way of finding clarity is through this simple, mechanical, and ancient mode of transportation.  This is exactly why, I theorize, I find the idea of homelessness in today’s society a romantic lifestyle.  Ah, I have reached the point.

     I cannot speak for everyone’s experience, but I often find myself upset when I see a fellow man hitch-hiking, usually alongside some highway.  I am upset at the notion of a being so similar to myself to be out of money, a home, food, and the usual comforts of living in the present age.  I am also upset at the natural inclination to slow my car to a halt right before that person and to help them out.  Perhaps it is a brainwashed type notion that I am afraid of the dangers that this person who clearly does not fit inside of society like the rest of us wants and needs direct intervention from someone as innocent as me.  Perhaps it is that I am so desensitized to the sight of this slightly ragged clothed and worn down looking stranger hitchhiking down the road that I don’t even think one option of my free will at that point would be to slow.  Perhaps it is my sheer instinct of survival to not even take a second thought to put myself in such a rare percentage of danger.  Whatever it is, it is harsh and ironic that I, myself, nurture such thoughts as to purposefully put myself in that same situation.  My god, why would a person have such a nasty idea?  As I have explained before, it is simply for the purpose of being able to walk; and not just walk, but walk for a great distance with no other material concerns. 

     The act of walking is a simple and very important explanation for my naïve idealizations, but there is also a concept to explain.  This concept is always on the tip of my understanding, and yet so far from truly being reached: freedom.  I have the privilege of being able to choose where I want to be in the day, what to eat, and what to say, so I am relatively free.  Yet, sometimes I long to break the cycle of going to point A, B, or C week after week; I load the groceries and unload the trash, I am herded off to school and back, and so forth.  The homeless are not free from worrying about their basic needs, but they are free to not think about all of their other needs.  I long to have the freedom to not call any place home, not label any object as my own.  Do you understand yet?  There might be something deeply rooted in my brain that craves that instinctual survival because humans evolved that way, and if there was anything we did well, it was survive.  Over endless years, we came from harvesting and collecting food ourselves in small traveling groups to forming systems, stabilizing, agriculture, culture, governing, introducing currency, income, taxes, laws, and crimes.  There is something appealing about breaking from all of that responsibility, and just going back to the basics.  No, not the efficiency apartment basics, but the true basics.  I know.  This is why they had experimental communes, and brainwashing, and mass suicides, but, if that had not gone awry I would have made the same mistake.   I dream of true self-sufficiency, of simplicity, of valid freedom, and of clarity. 

     Alas, I am a creature of comfort, and of fear.  So, I will not simply walk off the map.  Sadly, I will not strap on my best pair of shoes and pack off to the west.  I will not let myself go.  I won’t even break my responsibilities.  So, I must find a way to incorporate such freedoms, romantics, and simplicity into my modernized life.  Is it normal to feel I am an anachronism for the savannah grasslands era?  Dear, is anything normal?

Ball of energy

 A reflective blog for you on the pains of love.  I wrote this a while ago, and it's been silent as a ghost in my Word folder, waiting patiently for its turn to be shown.  At the end is a poem I wrote a little more recently as well.  Something about tonight just seems right to finally post it though as I've read a number of touching and darker things today:

     There is a ball of energy of a nameless color and light that hides in the dark- and not just “the” dark, but your own darkness.  This ball will explode within us all at one point in time- forcing us to drip in cold sweat- facing the ugly side of ourselves and the mistakes we’ve made.  Facing the truth of how bad we all are at living life and understanding and treating a relationship like it really should be treated.  It is important to acknowledge that we all start out as nothing- as naive as a rock is to humanity, and then a gradual incline in intelligence grants us the most confusing process of learning for ourselves (or at least those beings closest to us).  

      We must choose a person to use as a learning tool- we start with a guinea pig to try out love on.  Too bad this guinea pig will be the one with which the chemicals in your body will react to the strongest- and every new experience that comes with the beauty of love will be the freshest and seem the most genuine with them because it is the first time.  Too bad we will all mess this up because we are human and to learn we must first make mistakes.  So we blame these failures on your own guinea pig- or the relationship you’ve built around them- because of course, what’s the point in hating yourself more than others if being with yourself in life is the only certain thing.  You may not break up with yourself, unless you use death itself.

      So, we turn to these fresh loves: the ones we tested out our first pet names on, the ones we explored in the darkest rooms with the most intimacy, the ones we laughed and cried the hardest with, the ones of which at each new stage of love, we dismissed all the preceding ones (because, we thought it was love before, but now..), the ones which we experience a oneness with; something we had not experienced since the mother’s womb, the ones which their emotions and feelings were of mutual significance to figure out and settle.  Those ones.  Those are the ones we yell at, criticize, live with too early, question too much, distrust, lie to, discourage, cheat on, and hate. 

     The one person that you will have the most romantic significance with, looking back is the one we screw up the worst with.  So we “move on”- a phrase that should be removed from the dictionary due to its deceitful hopefulness.  Then we feel a dissonance, a disconnect, a hurt so bad it transforms to all aspects a human being can experience: pure pain.  We attempt to recreate this same magic with others and we fail and we feel split in two because the real, true one is out there rebounding off of you onto other people whom are way better in your own eyes than they ever were to your one.  You become paranoid, disillusioned, disheartened, self-conscious, cynical, and depressed.  In other words, you “move on.”  And then what?

 Cross

The night was wrought with dirty tears

The swelling notion that our worlds would end

So we beat angrily against each others chests

Fists bleeding with uncertain blame

Time looping our words that we risked shouting

An active attempt to store your mistakes into my memory

And just as strongly trying to capture the sight of your eyes

As we let our bitter concerns drown the real point

Until there was no environment anymore

I could not sense the chill air stroking my neck

I could only feel my uncensored words spilling out

Like too small a bowl for a voracious appetite

My desperation to condemn his lack of sincerity

His joke of a contribution, of empathy, and of love

But I laughed just as loud as his accusations

That made me out to be the witch that I am

But I confess it’s true; my existence screamed naive

While he was capital letter competent

But that night, I drove us inadvertently into a hell ditch

I was intent on proving myself worth something

My admission of failure did not crack so easily

The fork in our path still causes deep seated agony

And I only wish I tried harder to remember your face

As it was painted with love and vulnerability

Instead the sight I relive is your eyes filled with hurt and hatred

Cheers,

Joolia

Curiosity

It's curious what will finally inspire you to create a blog.  

Mine came from the best advice/ life saying all year; a homeless man said to me: "there is only forward, never straight (forward)." 

At first I laughed at what he said, then it seemed to really ring true to life; and I thought about how all he can do and ever had done is move forward with his actions and decisions.  That our paths are never as simple as straight in one direction.  In fact, you can't hardly go from point A to point B in the car or on foot in a straight line.  There are so many obstacles, small or large that will discourage you, or make it impossible to move straight forward. 

 So, I think we need to embrace living life in a curvy way forward, accepting from the beginning that the path will not be a perfectly straight line, and that if it was we might be bored to tears and feel robotic.  We are humans, after all, not computers.

In other words, get your ears wet, roll your sleeves up, take the scenic route, etc, etc. 

Funny how there are so many expressions for this exact phrase or feeling.  Not funny in a ha-ha way, not even funny in an ironic way, but funny in a curious way.  

I guess it's not important that it's been said before, but that we are reminded of what has been said before.  If the homeless man had not said that to me, I might have forgotten to let loose a little.  Maybe it was only significant because it came out of an unexpectedly insightful interaction.  

Funny what catches your mind.