What ever happened to the beatniks? The hippies? When I stop to think about such things I can’t help but make a connection between the eventual resignation of these former vanguards of hope and the concessions I find myself making more and more as the years roll by. I don’t want to give up the ghost, not today and not ever, yet I wrack my brain in search of role model, a guide, or even a reliable map. For the time being I keep struggling to live a life worth living, but in the pit of my gut I’m afraid this is all no more than the death throes of what I will come to see as an idealistic phase. As I write this the guys are on the road, rocking out on the historic first tour. They just keep going further and further into debt, further and further down this road that may turn out, that most probably will turn out to be a dead end, and yet they continue on, undaunted. Maybe that’s the difference between Eric and me at this point in our lives. He knows damned well that it may be a dead end, but nonetheless he has resolved to keep rolling along. I suspect that Henry Miller looked at his writing in much the same way. As great a writer as he was, that he eventually became well known was largely due to the fact that his banned books became available in the US during the sexual revolution of the sixties. Some lies I repeat again and again in my life, and the one about searching in vain for a role model is a big ass whopper of a lie. I’m just not willing to go barreling down any road once I see that dead end sign, despite the fact that life within the existing maze seems so utterly pointless. So what if it’s a dead end? So what if I run head on into a brick wall. That’s it! The dream! Barreling head on into that fatal wreck–in Bessy no less! I woke up so terrified, trying to convince myself it was just a dream and I could take it all back somehow, take back that blasphemous resignation to death. I actually felt afraid that I had jinxed myself somehow, that I just might get what I wished for.
What is the road of life if not a dead end? What is more terrifying, hitting the wall at seventy miles per hour or puttering out in the middle of Main Street in front of the post office, eyes bulging out our skulls in a death stare as the onlookers shake their heads as if to say “What a shame.” Those same blank faced goons will be back sipping their lattes and barking into their cell phone before your last breath hits the windshield. These days you can get a video monitor built in to you tombstone so that you can live on in death just as you did in life, an endless looping of play and rewind, play and rewind. Yes, my life is a dead end street. Who’s to say though, whether or not there’ll be a wall at end or just some trees, and that if it’s trees maybe I won’t wend my way through somehow, or else just make a new go of it deep in the forest. Who makes the street signs anyway?
Archive for July, 2004
New employee orientation at UK. One week until m.a.’s return from Mexico and so begins another chapter in the life of Bobby. The last two nights I did some extended meditation before falling asleep and, as expected, there’s been somewhat of a reconnection to my dream life. The night before last I suddenly remembered the city, the city of my dreams, the one set up on a hill with the giant billboards and marquis. It’s just one block really, with all outlets quickly fading into foggy nothingness. I can’t remember the first time I dreamed of the city, and it could be that I only imagined it briefly. Yet it remains burned into my memory like a first kiss or a formative humiliation. Henry Miller said his first impression of the world was that it was good, but frightening. I’m not sure if I ever felt the world to be inherently good. Frightening, yes.
Last night I dreamed I embraced death. I can’t recall the exact details, but as I was speeding out of control (in the red version of Bessy) I realized, just a fraction of a second before a devastating crash, not only that I was certain to die (in the crash), but that I was ready and willing to do so. The impact jolted me awake, and I got up to take a leak, acutely aware of a fear verging on terror spreading over me.