(Dated 12/07/2014)
Imagine a world where you don’t
need money to survive: where people are kind and they smile at you and say good
morning like they really feel it; a world where a man smiles at a woman with
genuine good will rather than imagining what lies beneath her clothes. Imagine
a world without passports and borders and jobs and responsibilities, where you
can just pack your bag and walk out. Imagine everything that John Lennon told
you to imagine. Now open your eyes.
You are looking at a screen,
reading the thoughts of a person you may or may not know and most likely do not
care about. You pause thinking, “this is depressing” and retire to your phone
for five minutes, checking out random peoples’ engagement photos on Facebook
and blasting pixel jellies out of the way. Maybe, you play a round of Quiz Up
and bask in the glory of defeating someone you don’t know in something that
NOBODY, including you, cares about. But you like to win, don’t you. You like
the rush of being number one and having people look up to you as number one,
don’t you. You like feeling important and popular even if it is for a minute
don’t you? You get back to this blog post and immediately switch to Facebook on
your laptop. Pictures of cute kittens, videos of babies getting massages, NSFW
pictures of some model on some beach on some mind-numbingly stupid gossip rag.
You go to sleep. You wake up four hours later and first things first you check
your phone, to see who has messaged you.
I want to modify John Lennon’s
message for our generation. Someday, soon, I want to wake up in the morning
with a smile on my face, grab a backup with only two t shirts and a pair of
jeans, an anorak and some cash, some books and walk out of my house, without my
phone or my laptop. I want to buy a road atlas, and drive a car across America,
catch a plane to Tokyo, navigate the crazy beautiful city with simple tourist-guide
paper backs in English. After that I want to move, by car, by bus, by train.
Hitchhiking, illegal car shares and selling my books for money for the next air
ticket. Maybe I’ll consider sleeping with a man for a couple thousand dollars.
Maybe I will reconsider. In any case, I will make my way to Bangkok and party
all night, for a week. And when I run out of money, I will bus tables, or lead
English tours to make some more.
I want to climb mountains. I want
to take a dip in every ocean of the world, including the frigid arctic waters.
I want to boat across rivers; white water rafting, with my heart in mouth and
in those woven little boats, languidly floating across a sprawling tropical
river, swatting mosquitoes with my hat. I want to visit villages and relish the
fact that there are people who survive without cell phones, and laptops, and TV
and expensive alcohol, and high heeled shoes, and mad urge to compete with and
destroy any peer who threatens your self-worth. I want to wade knee deep into
paddy fields in Laos or Cambodia or South India, and tend to the grains that
grow from the soil, to sustain us. Plants, birds, animals and less fortunate
human beings: all being born apparently for only one purpose, to serve those
who can afford them. I want to sit on the shores of white, sandy beaches,
watching the orange sun set slowly out of view, with a paper cup full of wine
and no shoes. Nowhere to go, no deadlines, no Tinder, no impressing people. No
need of a companion or investments or housing or higher education.
And finally when I am tired and I
am all out of money and resources, when my bones grow old, and my mind can’t
take it anymore, maybe I will climb one last mountain, watch one last sunset
and ride one last ride to the bottom. I will not be confined by decay or
disease, by hospitals or ungrateful progeny. I will fade along with the sun and
I will go back to the soil I came from.
I wonder and I bet you wonder
too, that why does inspiration only strike at four thirty in the morning. Maybe
because you are as sick of it all as I am. Maybe because you are as scared as I
am about facing reality that we absolutely have no choice to do what I dream
of. Not you and not I. And it is fucking scary to think about finding happiness
when everything about the world is wrong. But maybe you will go down without a
fight, (paraphrasing a good friend), but I won’t. I will fight to keep my dream
alive. I will strive to remain unhappy, dissatisfied, vulnerable and
masochistic, because it keeps my dream alive: my dream to escape, my dream to
not conform and my dream to escape from the daily reminders that I am useless
until I prove otherwise. Yes, I will fight to remain unhappy because someday I
want to be brave enough to give it all up and run away. Someday, I will run
away and none of you will ever find me.
