Cliches on Pedestrian Love

“Hello baby welcome to the world.  I’ll me be your hideaway girl. Come on baby let your light shine down.  You’re the best I ever found.”  ~Jimmy LaFave

Clichés on taking a risk.

If you don’t take a chance, you don’t stand a chance.

The road less travelled has made all the difference.

All you need is love.

Everything happens for a reason.

If it’s meant to be, it will be.

The person who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing, is nothing, and becomes nothing. He may avoid suffering and sorrow, but he simply cannot learn and feel and change and grow and love and live.

* * *

And all clichés aside.  Here I am.  Alone.  Finishing off a six-pack of Bud and a bottle of red and a tin of Cope.  So fuck that.

And here’s my own cliché on love and life.

Life is fucking hard.  Love is even harder.  You can’t control who enters your life or who you love.  But you can control whether or not you run away.  And all I’ve ever done, or wanted to do, it run.  Run far, and run fast.  And for the first time in my life the tables are turned.  And I decided to stay and fight the proverbial good fight.  And he decided to throw in the proverbial towel.  And I realized that I can throw in the towel and run.  But that it won’t make a damn bit of difference in how I feel.  Or in how I hurt. 

And fear is a fundamental and unavoidable roadblock in life.  We have so much fear as a human race that we forget what living is.  And what love really is.  And what the truth is.  And we succumb to those fears.  And we eat healthy.  And work hard.  And stay busy.  And eat good food.  And drink heavy.  And we forget.  At least for a moment.  Those great fears.  And those great loves.  But fuckin’-a at least we don’t hurt so bad it feels like our heart is being run through a shop vac. 

So yeah, I get it.  I know what it’s like to feel scared.  Scared that you won’t measure up.  To what others want for you.  To what you want for yourself.  Scared that you might have found someone worth the good fight.  And to be scared that you don’t have the good fight in you.  And to be scared you’ll get hurt.  And to be scared that you don’t know where it’s going.  And to be scared you’ll lose a part of yourself if you give into what your heart and soul are telling you.  And the piss-poor judgment of a knee-jerk reaction is to call it quits.  And say it’s been real.  So, in the nicest possible way, fuck off.  Because I’m too scared to deal with the reality of the situation.  And here’s where somehow each and every two-cent cliché makes sense.

But here’s where the unfortunate truth comes knocking on the door to crash the party.  And where those clichés come into play.  And as an expensively-educated, philosophically-minded Kantian-wanna-be I resent my submission to, hell my slavery to, pedestrian clichés.  But here I am.  Stuck.  Drinkin’ cheap beer. And chewin’ cheap tobacco.  By myself.   Wondering if it is more important to love or to live.  And wondering if, by some miracle of the simple-minded and eternally-hopeful, it’s possible to have both.  To love and to simultaneously live the life I’ve always dreamed of.  And I’m fucking, beyond-my-mind, crazy, out-of-control, terrified.  I’m terrified of what it might mean to admit to myself that I have feelings for something, for someone, outside of myself. 

And I choose to ignore it.  Or at least to rationalize it.  To not throw in the towel until I’d decided, by my incredible and expensively-acquired powers of deductive (or inductive) reasoning, that it was rational to pursue.  But the unfortunate part of this situation is that I can’t control what the other variables enter into my calculus of love.  And I suppose that’s where philosophers of the great, dead, white, Western tradition have failed time and time again.  Because there is no rational or reasonable explanation for putting yourself in a situation of certain and eminent peril and heartbreak.  No other animal willingly enters into a situation in which it is certain to fail.  To hurt. Hell, to die and painful and unreasonable death. 

Fuck yeah humans.

So I’ll toast once again to you.  To what might have been. And come on and pick me up because I just came to say goodbye love.  Good luck out there.  Hopefully I’ll see you again.  If not here, then on the other side.

Welcome To Wonderhell

I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole.

Into a wanna-be-hippie, thoroughly yuppie, always organic, sustainably designed, yogic, suburban Wonderhell.  And I can’t get out.  And like Alice in the rabbit hole, I’m not certain which direction I’m going, or which direction I came from in this suburban strip mall of a yuppie’s wet dream. 

Yesterday I got lost in a parking lot.  While driving.  Today I got lost in a pedestrian mall.  Just another day in the life of Wonderhell.

Everywhere I look there’s wannabe hippie, yuppie scum, trustafarians buying local, eating organic, riding cruiser bikes and cursing corporate America.  All while failing to see that their yippie wonderland was created by The Man himself.  And that trust fund they’re dipping into, and the Range Rover they’re driving drips from the power teat of capitalistic mass consumption. 

And don’t get me wrong.  I’m all for glutonistic mass consumption and corporately manipulated consumer greed.  And these yippies have some great ideas about how to put a feel-good, green spin on the old favorite known as greed.  I relish the fact that within one square mile I can shop at Prana, North Face, Mont Bell, Patagonia, Volcom, Smith, Whole Foods, assorted local/organic coffeehouses and sundry local/organic/sustainable/biodynamic/natural/vegan/vegetarian/ethnic/over-priced establishments of wining and dining.  But unlike the yuppies, posing as local/organic hippies, I fully admit to the fact our world is inherently driven by consumer desire and homogenous mass consumption. 

After all Wonderhell, in all of it’s green-designed, bamboo-floored, solar-paneled, prefabricated housing greatness, is a lesson in the homogeneity of an age-old phenomenon knows as Keepus Jonses, or, alternatively, “keeping up with the Joneses.”  While these ideas, from organic food, to green housing, to trendy locally owned boutiques selling adorable sustainable paper products and BPA free water bottles, seem progressive, unique, interesting and even cutting edge, they are in fact nothing more than a 21^st century rendition of the Joneses.   It’s a new spin on the 1950’s post-war society that demanded a college education, a grey flannel suit, a split level ranch in a growing suburb and a glowing Barbie doll called your wife, of every 20-something white male in America.  It was, after all, the American dream. 

And this Leave It To Beaver Stepford is not as far away as we yippies would like to think.  The homogeneity of Stepford went green, started shopping local and buying organic and before they knew what had hit ‘em they were conforming once again.  In an effort to rebel against The Man (their parents) and change the world (Stepford) they simply replaced the old forced conformity with a newer, more politically correct, yogic, organic version.  They put their Wonderhell in a myriad assortment of towns which allowed them to maintain the “healthy and active” lifestyle mandated by the dictator of Wonderhell. 

And while I thoroughly appreciate the convenience and benefits of suburban Wonderhell I’ll take urban Clusterfuck or country Redneckville any day over this homogenized and vacuum-sealed playground for the yuppies, the yippies, the hippies and everyone in between (at least everyone that fits in between the borders of the spectrum of conformity dictated in the Wonderhell Bible, aka, Stuff White People Like, aka Stuff Yuppies Like, aka Stuff People From Boulder Like).  Because, despite their shortcomings, these places have a certain degree of authenticity that is irreplaceable and unable to be prefabricated or designed.

So until I find the little door (or was it the giant door) out of Wonderhell, you must excuse me because I’ve many commitments to keep when in Rome, if you will.  I’m off to Whole Foods before I go to yoga and then I’m due at a dinner engagement at a trendy-chic, local-organic yuppie wining and dining hole.  Namaste.