This all started with the government shutdown. You, know- the one that never happened.
Since my job is government related I began to daydream about spring break. Of course, I wouldn't have been furloughed, since I work for a private company. I just couldn't help but begin to daydream. Reading, time to train, adventures, a beach trip, hiking around on some mountain, drawing, figuring out what I want to do with my life. I could have had time for it all. I wouldn't have gotten any of that, but I can dream, can't I?
On top of all that I'm re-reading the Dharma Bums.
The result of all this was is that my brain has gotten stuck in the change loop. These routines that have become my life seem worn and rusty. I don't feel like I am pushing myself. I want to run wild. I want to go hike Matterhorn with Japhy, forget that I own an iphone, and feel connected with the earth and whatever it is that binds us to it.
Maybe the modern condition of government shutdowns, recession, earthquakes and meltdowns, antibiotics and hormones in food, chemicals in plastics, and revolution and war in the middle east has gotten to me. Maybe I'm tired of staring at a screen for 8 hours a day, and coming home to play with a smart phone while mindlessly watching TV when I'm not training for a triathlon, recovering from training, or sleeping. Maybe the suburban life that has neither the drive of a city or the tranquility of a mountain top has dropped me into a funk. Maybe I'm just Beat at the moment.
It's the sort of scene Norman Mailer once set before writing: "It is on this bleak scene that a phenomenon has appeared: the American existentialist—the hipster, the man who knows that if our collective condition is to live with instant death by atomic war, relatively quick death by the State as l’univers concentrationnaire, or with a slow death by conformity with every creative and rebellious instinct stifled (at what damage to the mind and the heart and the liver and the nerves no research foundation for cancer will discover in a hurry) , if the fate of twentieth century man is to live with death from adolescence to premature senescence, why then the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self.
I think that in the Fall of '57, when The White Negro was published, perhaps that was the only answer. Certainly that answer became what we know as the iconic 60s. Today I feel like there are other answers. We don't have to drop out. I'd really like to think that at least. For the most part I really enjoy my life, and although I've admittedly run away from it at times, I don't really care to drop out of society. I'm done running. You can travel around the world, and never-never land exists on mountaintops, and at the end of the day it doesn't change much. Not that I don't plan on figuring out how to go all over the world or live on mountaintops again, but in the future either option is going to look very different.
So, what's the answer? How can you live within modernity? Obviously, the ending of the 20th century didn't change much. Obviously, every generation since the beginning of man has spent a considerable amount of energy attempting to figure this out. That's the thing- there are no universal answers. I feel like I'm getting closer, but I am not there yet. That's probably the answer- we get there, little by little.
