A Living Magazine - Day 168 - Nothing to See Here

Well, this spot worked out very well...

Opposite of sex. I leave a dry spot.

One inch thick vines with large spikes on them.

I had the essay on choice in my head and had to get it written, no matter what else I did on this day. I went and did my restaurant hotspot jumping, composing all day, while fighting off an ignorant friend who tried to promote texting and driving as an activity that self-congratulatory "good drivers" should be able to do. It turned into more of a game for him, seeing just how irrational he could be about it, to work up people, myself included. Folks, not what I needed...

I don't know why someone can do what I'm doing, be as upfront as I am about myself, open my entire life to the public eye and honestly express my own beliefs through an awful lot of hard work, then be harassed by people, apparently just because they are bored.

This goes some of the way toward what I wrote about on this day. Do people actually WANT peace? I'm pretty much thinking--NO. When even a friend is willing to cause conflict for no reason against his innocent friend (me), while blithely defending his delusions about putting the lives of other people at risk, in order to tap on his cellphone while he drives with his knee on the steering wheel, how will whole cultures avoid an all out blood bath the likes of which the world has never seen before?

Still, I got the work done after eight hours of continuous writing. I was exhausted. My spirit was dimmed from the constant struggle. What does one do, when he sees what is to come, tries as hard as he humanly can--and then some, to warn everyone, and is met by indifference and game-players?

I don't discount the hundred or so people who genuinely stand with me on these things. And, they really go above and beyond themselves to help out. They are the first of "A New Age of Heroes" I wrote about.

On this day I was downcast. I packed up my laptop, and was glad to have at least published my thoughts on all of this. Now they are out there. Maybe if this generation can't stay awake long enough, there will be a few people left in the future who can understand that this had been the time...

I walked past the honking horns, waited while no driver let me cross the roads--that have no walk signs nor crosswalks, the only pedestrian in twenty miles--either direction, alone on streets clogged with a solid wall nine lanes of thick traffic--steel, glass and plastic.

Sirens screeched in 360 degrees of controlled chaos, peeling tires, the smell of exhaust everywhere, red flashing lights, blue flashing lights, cars without working lights of any kind, giant billboards with the faces of attorneys, drug companies, banks and 1-888 numbers, broken street lights, stripmalls flanking everything, with their own glowing logos, while gas stations pumped the car-drug into every tank and the humans received their own poisons--cigarettes and alcohol, from behind bulletproof glass and iron gated windows.

Pop songs, with plastic surgery-altered, cookie cutter, vocoded singers, pumped out of the din of a thousand cars each tuned to different stations playing the same shit; each tune ticking away at 120 beats per second, riding the same chord progressions, through the same synthesizers, repeating the same chorus dozens of times, using the same melodies, repeated, cycled, rotated, in an infinite hell of sound. There is actually a pop station here called WADD.

Dirty parking lots, overpasses, underpasses, on ramps and off ramps, car alarms, concrete, asphalt, tar, cement, power wires, walls, barriers, chain link fences, culverts, smelly sewage filled rivers, screaming, yelling, swearing, crying, pleading...

Just everyday America.

You don't see it the way I see it. I remember what it was like to be you. I used to hide behind my "Crime Watch" neighborhood, my garden fence, the walls of my house, the glow of my TV, the artificial vinyl of my car seats and phosphorescence of my dashboard. The outside world of towns and cities was something I just tolerated as part of the punishment of getting from the house to work, to the store, and back to the house again, where I could forget just how much of an intensely bad trip it all must be for those who never leave it. Now I am one of them. It used to be us and them. Now, it seems, it is you and me.

Now that I face it all day and night, week after week, month after month, I truly know just how far into insanity things are sinking.

No wonder, when I get to my sleep spots - if they are in a woods far enough away from the human maelstrom - I see no animals. I'm sure there were a few regular city critters there hiding, cowering, and a few unfortunate wild ones who mistakenly wandered in. But I could not see them. The stray dog I'd seen the other night was not an enemy. He was the last of the friends.

Just to have seen that spider in Montgomery was like a cool psychological breeze across the baking purgatory of technological over-excess. In the last two nights the only creature I've seen was a lone earwig who somehow got into the tent and desperately paced the screen above my head, until I scooped it up with a credit card receipt and dropped it outside.

And so, I stood there on this night, temporarily free. Cars were only a distant hum in this sleep spot. I listened for even the slightest sound that nature might be producing, and heard-------NOTHING. I looked around even closer, hoping to see a bird wake and then tuck its head under its wing. There were no birds. There were only pieces of trash; a Dasani water bottle, two take-out foam plates, a woman's shoes, an old carpet, a few beer cans, a leather belt...

I set up the tent slowly, deliberately, as my only religious ritual. Then, as one might in a temple, I sat in it and removed my smelly, ripped up, worn out boots, and tucked them into the side, as I always do. I removed the contents of my pockets and slipped them into the long inner pocket, pulled out the sleeping bag, the plastic Walgreens bag with my clean laundry in it as my pillow, and laid my body down.

For the first time in the last two years, I actually thought that maybe I don't really belong in this life, living? Maybe death was actually preferable? I don't seem to belong, and my lifestyle is driving me sane.

If everyone else is satisfied enough not to even pay attention to how profoundly cheap things have gotten, then maybe *I* am the one with the problem.

Maybe this is the way that humanity has CHOSEN to exist. Maybe the future is actually filled with tighter traffic jams, larger percentages of starving people, more monopolies, hotter air, more clogged rivers, less animals, sicker plants, more materially minded thing-fetishizing mind-less consumers, more weapons, more barriers, less love; all contained within a wider pyramid--occulting the spherical shape of the planet itself?

The Spark--was silent.