I feel like I'm in mourning.
I'm in mourning for a way of life--I have watched over the last several years as increasingly many scenes have died. Not the yuppie scenes, if it has a dint of respectibility, its alive and well, you can be sure. But even as dreadlocks, piercings, and tattoos become mainstream and yuppified, the forrunners of these acts of rebellion are being pushed farther and farther from their roots. They are still shunned as dirty, as rabble-rousers and trouble-makers. The yuppies are drawn like moths to flame to the freedom these rough elemebnts embody and embrace, a freedom they will never know, locked as they are in cultural rules and pointless ritual, but the danger that draws them also repels them, and they gentrify the old neighborhoods and drive out the very artists they came to embrace. Too many rough edges and uncouth manners, I suppose.
As the yuppies embrace the counter-culture, the counter-culture pushes even more limits, as they have always done. They dare what the mainstream doesnt dare, and the yuppified suburbanites turn away in fear. This, of course, is as its always been, but always before there has been a balance. It has been an ever growing thing, organic, as one hot spot dies, becomes too slum-like or too gentified, another has sprung up in its place, and the cycle begins again.
Recently, this has all changed. Across America, many of us have watched in horror as community after community has been overrun and the artists turned out, only to see no new gatherings. Old clubs, some several decades old, are closing their doors, and many arent reopening. For all the increasing mainstream acceptance of such things as goth, punk, kink, and other devient lifestyles, we are all watching in a numb sort of sad horror as the places that were once havens to these devients die around us.
I once read that you could tell a decline of a nation by the decline of their art. If this is true, then truly I am only an early mourner, only waiting for a final breath to be taken, and that first shovel of earth covering the grave.
Though perhaps this is only a reflection of a an inner, more personal pain. Perhaps I'm not seeing the world as it really is, but instead I have a shard of the Snow Queen's mirror in my eye, warping the world around me as it reflects my inner sorrows.
Maybe.
But I suspect instead my life is the mirror, reflecting a world that seems increasingly mad, where people walk like cattle into chains and then smile as they're slaughtered. A world where who you fuck is more important than who you kill. Disillusionment, thine name is conservatism.
I keep looking for that one being that will take my hand and fly. I have long since figured out I am too much cat and not enough human, chains and bonds of any kind sit on my shoulders uneasily, and I react as violently as a leashed feline to their touch. Oddly, I labor rather well under responsibility, duty, even honor, when I figure out what that is. But love, attraction, the more joyful emotions, those send me into a silent frenzy, and I will run rather than feel them, and leave rather than push them on the unwilling other party. If I even suspect they are unwilling, I go. Fast. Because of this and other reasons, I have about decided my life will be spent alone, and over the last several months have come to terms with that idea.
The other reasons seem to tie into the ever growing trend of conservatism, though I had noticed it even long before it became popular, the "In" thing to do. People are happy in their bonds and chains. Not happy as in joyful, but happy as in...content. Safe. Like a rabbit down its hole. Given the choice between a sudden trip to parts unknown or a day on the beach, most people's sense of adventure doesnt extend past the warm sand. And while it blows my mind, most people, whether they live in New Yoprk or a small town in backwoods nowhere dont realy WANT to go anywhere. To them, home is where they are born and die, and nothing out there has enough lure to stir them off their asses. And then there's the unspoken rule--if you reach a magical age, 25 or 30 or 40, you become "responsible," thinking ahed of nothing but your next career move and your next bills. Put away the parties and the good times, road trips are a thing of the past, wild dyed hair is a myth and a dream. Put down the tiki torches, hang up the bellydance clothing, put away the artists easel and novelist's pen, the dream is over. Welcome to the real world. Other things do it as well, having kids, getting married, buying your first house or car. Instant death, we become zombies in the cogs of a capitalist machine.
And yet I have seen successful escapees. Parents who strive and learn and become something more, who still piolet planes and hang glide and party until dawn, and yet their first responsibility is always their children. They SHARE their lives with their children, instead of allowing them to BECOME their lives. I have seen people drop everythng and travel at a moment's notice, or party until dawn at a rave, or run off with some wild hair up their butt and yet still pay all their bills and care for children and feed the cats and remain responsible. And in the end, this is who I want to be, what I want to become. I want to marry the person I most enjoy partying 'till dawn with and having wild x-rated sex session that make porn stas blush. I want someone who doesnt want to own me, or to be owned, but will simply, willingly take my hand and run, and see what life has to offer. I want someone I can cajole into going on a road trip with me, or who can drag my reluctant and screaming (and secretly thrilled) carcass to go water skiing or Conning or whatever I wouldnt have thought of doing on my own.
Just once I want to reach out a hand to someone and ever so sweetly ask "Can you come out to play?" and finally receive the reply "Yes." Simple as that, as a child reaching to a playmate, and indeed, thats what I want to spend the rest of my life doing, playing. I want to play with ideas, play with my mate, my children, my pets. I want to putter and play with building and creating a home of my own. I want to play with making money. I want to play with life until life begs ME for mercy. And really, I never want to stop. And I want that one sole individual who feels the same way.
And I watch as we all lean towards this conservative trend, as place after place I once thought of as oasises die and the scruffy is thrown out in favor of the shallow, and I despair. I despair for my old dream, and for this country's even older one. "Those who would trade freedom for security deserve neither," is the old saying, and its as true now as its ever been. Day by day it seems there is less we are allowed to do, if not by law, then by the coercion of peers who seem to feel more threatened by fuscia hair than by a real criminal, and would do anything to stomp out any last vetigal spark of individuality. But this is true on an inner level as well, for what we shun in others we also stomp outin ourselves. We chain ourselves in all these right and proper rules, how to sit, to dress, to act, and it becomes such second nature we find ourselves following them even when we hate them, even when we're all alone. We take away our own freedom, freedom of thought and action, and we do so for the approval of a society who doesnt accept or understand, and the safety that approval brings. Then we gorge ourselves on Prozak and Viagra and try to convince ourselves we're free and happy this way.
We deserve neither.
My hand has sat out there a long while, and has been extended to various people, and finally I feel I have to withdraw it for good. If I play, if I enjoy life, its will most likely be on my own. Am I really the only one in the world who remembers or cares what it is to have fun and play?
I feel I am mourning the death of freedom, freedom out there, and freedom in my own heart. I feel I am mourning the death of dreams that are now only words we speak and hopes we hold in vain. And on some level, I feel I am mourning for me. Last night I dreamed all night about a futile pursuit of a person I had once deeply cherished, and the now familier bitter taste of rejection. It was a hard dream, and I woke up tired. Tonight I have henna and a prayer on my feet, a wish for movement and flight. I feel my whole life is that way, bitterness and a prayer my only defense against the ransacking ofmy soul. And tonight I read the words of others, words of communities and dreams dying, and I think on my own, and it feels like mourning, almost.
But for what, I do not know.
I'm in mourning for a way of life--I have watched over the last several years as increasingly many scenes have died. Not the yuppie scenes, if it has a dint of respectibility, its alive and well, you can be sure. But even as dreadlocks, piercings, and tattoos become mainstream and yuppified, the forrunners of these acts of rebellion are being pushed farther and farther from their roots. They are still shunned as dirty, as rabble-rousers and trouble-makers. The yuppies are drawn like moths to flame to the freedom these rough elemebnts embody and embrace, a freedom they will never know, locked as they are in cultural rules and pointless ritual, but the danger that draws them also repels them, and they gentrify the old neighborhoods and drive out the very artists they came to embrace. Too many rough edges and uncouth manners, I suppose.
As the yuppies embrace the counter-culture, the counter-culture pushes even more limits, as they have always done. They dare what the mainstream doesnt dare, and the yuppified suburbanites turn away in fear. This, of course, is as its always been, but always before there has been a balance. It has been an ever growing thing, organic, as one hot spot dies, becomes too slum-like or too gentified, another has sprung up in its place, and the cycle begins again.
Recently, this has all changed. Across America, many of us have watched in horror as community after community has been overrun and the artists turned out, only to see no new gatherings. Old clubs, some several decades old, are closing their doors, and many arent reopening. For all the increasing mainstream acceptance of such things as goth, punk, kink, and other devient lifestyles, we are all watching in a numb sort of sad horror as the places that were once havens to these devients die around us.
I once read that you could tell a decline of a nation by the decline of their art. If this is true, then truly I am only an early mourner, only waiting for a final breath to be taken, and that first shovel of earth covering the grave.
Though perhaps this is only a reflection of a an inner, more personal pain. Perhaps I'm not seeing the world as it really is, but instead I have a shard of the Snow Queen's mirror in my eye, warping the world around me as it reflects my inner sorrows.
Maybe.
But I suspect instead my life is the mirror, reflecting a world that seems increasingly mad, where people walk like cattle into chains and then smile as they're slaughtered. A world where who you fuck is more important than who you kill. Disillusionment, thine name is conservatism.
I keep looking for that one being that will take my hand and fly. I have long since figured out I am too much cat and not enough human, chains and bonds of any kind sit on my shoulders uneasily, and I react as violently as a leashed feline to their touch. Oddly, I labor rather well under responsibility, duty, even honor, when I figure out what that is. But love, attraction, the more joyful emotions, those send me into a silent frenzy, and I will run rather than feel them, and leave rather than push them on the unwilling other party. If I even suspect they are unwilling, I go. Fast. Because of this and other reasons, I have about decided my life will be spent alone, and over the last several months have come to terms with that idea.
The other reasons seem to tie into the ever growing trend of conservatism, though I had noticed it even long before it became popular, the "In" thing to do. People are happy in their bonds and chains. Not happy as in joyful, but happy as in...content. Safe. Like a rabbit down its hole. Given the choice between a sudden trip to parts unknown or a day on the beach, most people's sense of adventure doesnt extend past the warm sand. And while it blows my mind, most people, whether they live in New Yoprk or a small town in backwoods nowhere dont realy WANT to go anywhere. To them, home is where they are born and die, and nothing out there has enough lure to stir them off their asses. And then there's the unspoken rule--if you reach a magical age, 25 or 30 or 40, you become "responsible," thinking ahed of nothing but your next career move and your next bills. Put away the parties and the good times, road trips are a thing of the past, wild dyed hair is a myth and a dream. Put down the tiki torches, hang up the bellydance clothing, put away the artists easel and novelist's pen, the dream is over. Welcome to the real world. Other things do it as well, having kids, getting married, buying your first house or car. Instant death, we become zombies in the cogs of a capitalist machine.
And yet I have seen successful escapees. Parents who strive and learn and become something more, who still piolet planes and hang glide and party until dawn, and yet their first responsibility is always their children. They SHARE their lives with their children, instead of allowing them to BECOME their lives. I have seen people drop everythng and travel at a moment's notice, or party until dawn at a rave, or run off with some wild hair up their butt and yet still pay all their bills and care for children and feed the cats and remain responsible. And in the end, this is who I want to be, what I want to become. I want to marry the person I most enjoy partying 'till dawn with and having wild x-rated sex session that make porn stas blush. I want someone who doesnt want to own me, or to be owned, but will simply, willingly take my hand and run, and see what life has to offer. I want someone I can cajole into going on a road trip with me, or who can drag my reluctant and screaming (and secretly thrilled) carcass to go water skiing or Conning or whatever I wouldnt have thought of doing on my own.
Just once I want to reach out a hand to someone and ever so sweetly ask "Can you come out to play?" and finally receive the reply "Yes." Simple as that, as a child reaching to a playmate, and indeed, thats what I want to spend the rest of my life doing, playing. I want to play with ideas, play with my mate, my children, my pets. I want to putter and play with building and creating a home of my own. I want to play with making money. I want to play with life until life begs ME for mercy. And really, I never want to stop. And I want that one sole individual who feels the same way.
And I watch as we all lean towards this conservative trend, as place after place I once thought of as oasises die and the scruffy is thrown out in favor of the shallow, and I despair. I despair for my old dream, and for this country's even older one. "Those who would trade freedom for security deserve neither," is the old saying, and its as true now as its ever been. Day by day it seems there is less we are allowed to do, if not by law, then by the coercion of peers who seem to feel more threatened by fuscia hair than by a real criminal, and would do anything to stomp out any last vetigal spark of individuality. But this is true on an inner level as well, for what we shun in others we also stomp outin ourselves. We chain ourselves in all these right and proper rules, how to sit, to dress, to act, and it becomes such second nature we find ourselves following them even when we hate them, even when we're all alone. We take away our own freedom, freedom of thought and action, and we do so for the approval of a society who doesnt accept or understand, and the safety that approval brings. Then we gorge ourselves on Prozak and Viagra and try to convince ourselves we're free and happy this way.
We deserve neither.
My hand has sat out there a long while, and has been extended to various people, and finally I feel I have to withdraw it for good. If I play, if I enjoy life, its will most likely be on my own. Am I really the only one in the world who remembers or cares what it is to have fun and play?
I feel I am mourning the death of freedom, freedom out there, and freedom in my own heart. I feel I am mourning the death of dreams that are now only words we speak and hopes we hold in vain. And on some level, I feel I am mourning for me. Last night I dreamed all night about a futile pursuit of a person I had once deeply cherished, and the now familier bitter taste of rejection. It was a hard dream, and I woke up tired. Tonight I have henna and a prayer on my feet, a wish for movement and flight. I feel my whole life is that way, bitterness and a prayer my only defense against the ransacking ofmy soul. And tonight I read the words of others, words of communities and dreams dying, and I think on my own, and it feels like mourning, almost.
But for what, I do not know.
VIEW 6 of 6 COMMENTS
What is your definition of conservatism? Are you more upset with the moral conservatives, fiscal conservatives, or the general idea that we're effectively living in an oligarchy?