Skin (part one)

September 26, 2007

I look at where I live and realize that I have no reason to complain.

But true to the capitalist tradition, I realize

I want more.

Am I a victim of a system that will not let me be satisfied?

That makes it difficult to feel content

amidst a barrage of responsibilities?

Responsibility. An ideology we learn to respect. But

to whom or to what do I truly have a responsibility?

I am responsible for myself, but what does that entail?

Eating well, bathing regularly, taking good care of myself?

Then I ask the question: why? If I am responsible for myself

I infer that this responsibility complies with a social order.

Funny that we need laws

like we need sex

like we need entertainment

like we need jobs.

It is difficult to exercise restraint

when so much experience registers through the nervous system.

Perception.

If every view of the world is potentially different,

then no view of the world is absolute.

If no view of the world is absolute,

then there is no reference for right or wrong.

There goes responsibility.

But to live life according to standards—a code—

that one has written according to her own level of respect

and reverence for other life—

I think that is one responsibility to take seriously.

I'm responsible for loving, for promoting

life.

Yet I find so much of the social structure makes it inevitable that

death

maintains the population.

In my utopia suicide is appreciated and

individuals realize that the most

unobtrusive, inconsequential death

is their own

made selfless

by their own hands.

I'm not saying we should all jump off a cliff,

but there's something to be said about our lack of effort

in maintaining a standard of life:

Pro-choice, pro-life, vegan, omnivore, gun control, bearing arms, humane death sentences, legal narcotics, prescribed vacations, television, pornography, enterainment, art, slave trade, slave wage, atomic war, political and religious freedom, prejudice, racism, slash and burn, divide and conquer,

excusable hubris in the name of select symbols select minds agree upon.

What the fuck?

And when it comes down to it

I'm only burdening my mind

during a time when I'm supposed to be sleeping.

I can't live my life believing that

because I can sleep when I'm die it makes

sense to kill myself while I'm breathing.

And I'm at the point, more so every day,

where death becomes more threatening and yet less terrifying.

Bring it.

In the meantime, what doesn't kill me

only makes me that much more pissed off.

Ignorance is bliss. Hence the state of our global welfare.

Nothing is ever enough

and that is why I am tired.

And will not rest until I am done with this skin.

Nothing is ever enough

and that is why death,

and its weightlessness,

seems a heaven unto itself.

My father, grandfather and others to follow

are free, released from the gravity

of this plane of existence.

They have left stories. Words.

Because not even the shell decomposing

beneath engraved shining stone

can claim more than the words left to

remind.

Memory reconstructs a life

and depends on other modes of oral tradition

to pass along the tale,

to keep it real,

to keep it significant.

These fucking words.

Proof of our folly and glory

traceable in the symbols we have

painted, chiseled, drawn, typed onto the face of a day—a

moment—

proclaiming Life! Here! Now!

I was here.

Out of the random collision of bits

smaller than eyes can see

came me in this rough and vulnerable (easily influenced

and greatly inherited) form.

Behold individualism!

Behold divinity!

Behold a miracle of evolution!

This is Me.

Now take my curiosity

and stain it with your audacious

creations

added to the mix for no higher purpose than

self-gain, self-righteous,

survival?

If we are organisms competing against other organisms

I forfeit the game.

If to thrive I must abandon all that I deeply feel,

then, thank you,

I am better suited as a tree

following cycles of life and death with more grace and persistence

than any animal on earth has shown.

But I am here, stuck in this skin,

attached to the people and things that

are attached to me.

Not dependent, you see, just

emotionally invested.

And I'm back to responsibility

and duty.

Fuck.

How does one live for oneself as well as

for everyone else?

Through love?

But what is that but severe involvement? Attachment to a temporal realm?

What is love but another ideal to worship, covet, desire, strive for;

I can only avoid it to a degree (I am only human)

And I know it's mostly absurd,

mostly coincidental, rarely transcendental. Still I'm grateful.

Because of all the pain in the world.

If I had been born to no one, and raised by no one,

how would I respond to being loved? If I knew how to survive unloved,

isolated from the senseless complexities of human society?

Would I be peaceful? Automatically Zen?

Or violent and anxious?

Even beasts comply with a social order.

Nothing exists in isolation—at least not for very long.

The presence of life depends on interaction

between two parties in motion

waltzing, however haphazardly, through a space

defined relative to infinity.

What? Stop.

My head hurts.