fraggle

i'm going away for a couple of weeks, i've told a few people where i'm going, but i don't feel really compelled to publicly announce it. i'm in a really wierd headspace right now... it's very soon after burning man, which had an extreme impact on me that hasn't even finished unfolding, for me to go on another voyage that may have even an equally intense effect on my life/mind/outlook etc... i knew september was going to be literally chalk-full of transformative events... i could hardly believe, even up until this very moment, that these things were actually going to happen to me...

I don't know if this will make any sense: but stepping back and looking at the schedule of my life in the near future, it seems as though things are going according to "plan", in a wierd way... with everything happening at once like this, after such a long haitus in the void... it's like i'm standing on a bridge between two linked events, which will together make something totally different and unpredictable happen in my life; some massive change that i cannot as yet see, and for that reason i have been in a sort of strange dreamy disquiet state... sort of grave and somber about it, even though i perhaps ought to be jubillant-- that just hasn't been my reaction. i haven't been in a mood to respond with raw pleasure or pure excitement... that just isn't where my life is... as someone told me recently, i have a great many decisions to make in a very short time, and some very heavy things are in the balance, so to speak. i hope i don't sound too over-dramatic; but i can't even begin to describe or explain all the different influences i've been having to contend with-- but i think that if i could, then you would see what i mean... i am sure that there will be plenty of time to be excited... actually, i am quite aware that there is probably so much pent-up excitement, longing and desire to go on this trip, that will probably start to well up like a volcano as soon as i am on the plane; i'm sure that if i let it go now it would make my head explode, and i can't have that happening before i get myself to the airport... really, it hasn't gotten itself all the way through my head that i'm actually going-- that i'm actually doing this-- and that it's actually going to be almost two weeks... you can't understand how far from my reality this kind of thing has been; how extremely far from my reach it has felt.. how huge the barriers have seemed, how unjustly impossible all the hurtles have felt all this time... it has worn me down just wishing for it to happen someday, really... so a part of me doesn't want to rev myself up for dissappointment...

a year and a half ago i decided i wanted to go somehow to this country far away towards which i am going. but events were what they were, and instead i have spent a year living in the little town where i find myself today. and while sometimes i think bitterly of how i might have been over there instead of here, if things had been a little different, i suppose that in some ways things probably have gone as they were best to have gone... and while in some ways, this year in that town has left me an emotional wreck, confused the hell out of me, left me with no greater amount in my savings account and no closer to a job or any real decisions about my life, and while i feel like i've only made the same decisions over and over and over and failed again and again and again to actually manage to enforce those decisions; those decisions being, to leave this town and get myself to that place i thought i ought to go--- and in some ways it wounds me just thinking of those failed decision-making efforts, and wounds me just thinking that i might have missed my chance to go the other way... what really wounds me is any feeling that i might be being controlled by someone else: the same people who always controlled my life up until recently: the family i come from... the small-town mindset i come from... any of those fuckers or fucking places i come from... it wounds me just thinking, that i have repeated the same demands of myself over and over and over, and that they still have gone unfullfilled: that *I* have somehow remained unfullfilled all this while--- that i might continue to be... i have recieved the advice of hundreds upon hundreds of people older than myself at this point... and it seems, for all intensive purposes, that the only types of advice, or lessons, have come from experiences like these; like things that change the world around for awhile, that bend reality a little bit, and then when one comes down, when one returns to one's own life, things are never the same; things aren't possibly the same; because one's mind is not the same...

and so here i go on another trip around the wheel of fortune... here the world gives another shot at telling me whatever it is it's trying to say, trying to get me to understand. full blows to the head seem to be how it teaches me things these days. complete shocks to the system, the only things that work... everything else just settles back into the dust like it never happened and just feels like a wound afterward.

i never thought things would be this way; the life i've lived this year absolutely resembles nothing of the way i ever lived before, or the way i ever thought i would be living. and that's mainly because i made the choice, one way or another, not to have my life lived by my parents anymore, and i am still fighting every day to have that not happen any longer. the only thing i knew, coming into this, was that that would be difficult; and by god it has been, and still is. by difficult, i meant that they would fight back-- and they are alot bigger than me and have more to fight with... and that has proven true... but what i didn't know to expect, was the other side of that difficulty; the difficulty with everyday life, with eating and finding money for existing with; with people and with jobs and with finding and not finding work and a means of self-support, with all those little nasty usual things, with suddenly running into the feeling that i have utterly no idea how to do ANYTHING, and that i need suddenly, desperatelly to know EVERYTHING and that there is no one on this earth who is going to help me learn it... not the family, not unless i bend to what they want... not the people around me, not without alot of laughter and mockery and insistance that i be some other thing they would have me be... and there's been other difficulties also, beyond the ones everyone knows about; the difficulties that no one seems to know the answers to, that in fact, very old people tell me they still don't know the answers to: problems about not knowing why the hell i'm here, why the hell i am the way i am and what the fuck i'm supposed to do about it... these are the kinds of questions and problems that really bang up the insides of one's head, because they seem to be in the way of getting anything really started or really rolling... and i have so many people-- SO many people now, who tell me that if i just could get some focus, just narrow myself to a "project", that i could "really do something." those people i really want to stab, because i'm trying so fucking hard to solve these impossible problems that have no answer no matter how hard or long you try to solve them... the criticisms get more and more cruel all the time, it seems. the more i try to explain my situation to the people i meet, the more crude and outlandish and severe their criticisms about my life, my choices, even the fact that i went to college, become. people seem to find my unemployment the occasion to become ruthlessly, blatently, flat-out inhuman-harsh about my choice of majors, colleges, or going to college at all. i finally had someone ask, "what were you THINKING when you majored in art and philosophy?" it's really becoming more than i can bear. i'm starting to just shut down entirely when the subject comes up in conversation; i'm not able to respond to these crazy, filthy responses to my past. some fucking woman had the nerve to directly tell me, LAUGHING, when i didn't know what some fucking particular postal-air-service thing was, "you gotta get out and see the world! you didn't learn anything from your ivory tower!" i wanted to decapitate her, i really did. it's getting harder and harder to cope with people who react like this. i never thought i would have to contend with this kind of militant ignorance. i turn out to be nothing but a mystery to everyone i find myself around these days, and i have failed in every attempt to clarify myself to anyone.

and so now i've totally started crying while typing this. you perhaps can see that i've been living in a more-complicated whirlwind than i ever thought i'd have to find myself in, and whether or not i've handled it well at all, who knows. i have the horrible feeling sometimes that i haven't handled my post-graduating existance very well at all-- that is, the first year of my life that i've chosen for myself; where my lifestyle, my location, my activities were more or less of MY design and no one elses'--- it's hard to say whether my choices have been good ones, but it's definatelly true they've all been mine... the best that i could do at the time, at least i think they were... and i lie in agony for hours sometimes, that i get so little support from the very people i thought--- i had TOTALLY thought, my whole life before, growing up, that i could rely on. the world has, in many ways, flipped entirely upside down since my parent's divorce, which accompanied my graduation...


individuals in my life instantly became the opposite of who they were to me before the "break up"... I myself have become the family black sheep instead of the family star... everything is on its head and shows no side of coming down any time soon... they are being hard to be "from"...


...there is more that i could say but i have said alot; and i cannot stop talking sometimes, when that vein is opened up... and i feel that if i continue to make predictions or forecasts about myself or what i think i want to happen, that i will only open myself up for further dissappointments or discust in the future; and forecasts, promises and demands for change this way or that way is all i have left in my head at this point.