DIY

so i've been thinking lately (by "lately" i mean..the past several years) (but more specifically maybe, the past week or so) about how crazy it makes me to have to exist within the confines of the status quo. to a certain extent. but i mean...having to grow up and then realize that you're kind of momentarily trapped in the place you've grown up into...the world as we know it.

i wrote a paper for chuck keim a couple years back about the transferrance of the european/north american system onto africa. it's completely shocking and devastating to a people who have sustained themselves in a certain way for so long to suddenly have to conform to a whole new ideal and means by which to reach not only that transplanted ideal but basic needs as well. (image: a poor african man running in the dust beside a train full of wealthy tourists, holding up a little soapstone trinket he has fashioned in hopes that someone would rain down coins on him in exchange for a souvenir...coins he now needs to a) affirm his place within the imposed economic system and b) simply acquire essential resources that have become property of the system).

i am jealous of the man in the old story because i feel he at least knew something else, a piece of a life that seemed right, from before the dictators set foot in his land and refashioned his existence... as a person who has been born and nurtured within the system, within a highly structured society, i feel that there's this whole other life that i was built for, that i have never experienced. yet. i was watching a movie yesterday wherein a scientist working on time travel was being lectured by his rich and greedy boss...Bossman offered him something along the lines of a challenge in that "in a world where nothing is left to be explored/discovered/mapped...time is the new frontier." [super-paraphrased!]

that stupid statement in a cheesy movie made me kind of sad because it's sort of true...we've sprawled all over the planet and exploited the lot of it. i'm an adventurer and a discoverer deep in my bones, so it also made me kind of sad in a global sense i suppose. not that i actually want to sail off into the unknown waters in search of unmapped land, because the ocean terrifies me. but...i guess it just hits a person prone to that kind of seeking when they realize it's all been done. that they're living in a controlled environment (gross generalization...obviously i know we aren't in control in a grand sense..just that we have constructed a "reality" in which we seem to be and act like we are, leaving little room for wonder and ambition). i remember this scene in the new Pirates movie where a guy is painting a map of the discovered world on a wall...and there just seems to be this simplicity and unfinished quality about it...blank spaces full of potential...those are the places my eyes and my essence are drawn to.

so in a culture and a country and maybe even a globe that have been so systematically developed and intricately constructed.....living within this comfortable, fully-functional, convenient context....i'm losing myself. i think. or maybe not. maybe i'm finding myself.

i laugh at myself a lot. because i'm ridiculously selfish and childish and grandiose about things. the part of me that resists being consumed by the system makes statements like, "i'm going to build my own house and everything in it...i don't want to own or experience or exist within anything that has been imposed upon me or designed by somebody else who has bought into this ordinary and eroding vision of what life should be." but it's not that i'm just being really difficult, i realize, it's because i feel hurt that creativity and innovation and adventure are so stifled by the IKEAn Method. (if i was a psychologist or an anthropologist, i would copyright that and write a book about it).

i am watching so many people i know growing up... (i also watched the beginning of Hook today...that always gets me going on this sort of thing...that scene where Peter's son is telling old Wendy about Businessman Peter's method for "blowing the competition out of the water" and where Wendy looks at Peter with a knowing saddness in her eyes and says, "So, Peter...you've become a pirate" .....) well...i'm watching my friends growing up into this place and this vision (or lack thereof) and dreading what they are in danger of becoming. Comfort is a horrible killer. it links its arms in Apathy's and tramples dreams and lives and possibilities. a mangled dance and a hideous laugh drowned out by the soothing lie they spin to.

so please remember, if you've read this far, to listen closely. ask questions whose answers are difficult to find.

i watched a pop culture documentary on the history of comic books this morning. it was insanely interesting. and in the end, one of the men said something very compelling that (while it was inspired by the characters at hand--ultimately "imaginary" and "superhuman" people) seemed to transcend its context. he pointed out the ability, the potential, of one person to impact the entire world. so of all the things in this life that i have laid out before me and am making my way into...what will outlast me...what will be worth my time...and what can i challenge and change? i'm making a new map.