Sometimes I feel the need to pen it all down. In fact, I feel the need to pen it down every day, hoping that the raging storm of thoughts inside my head would finally relent. Then I think of all those things on my to-do list for the day or week - for work, for home, for myself, for other people.
Life gets in the way, and my storm of completely futile and intense thoughts rages on. And I, once again, make fake peace with the fact that most of my time, the time I use to see, feel, touch and taste this world, the hours I am allotted in this world - my time, actually isn't mine at all. What would I do with my time if it was truly mine ? I would write, write for hours on end, and read. I would ride my bicycle, read, write, play a guitar,travel, sing, spend time with people I love, laugh and smile - and do it all over again. That is of course, if this whole world wasn't organized around buying and selling each other's time.
I never thought of it quite like this, but may be this contraption has been created by this country, the land of plenty - where not achieving the American Dream, for lack of intent or ability, is a calamitous fall from social grace. More so, if you went to college, and worse if you went to grad school, and you can sign away your life if you went to two graduate schools. And why not? After all, this country created a legal and physical infrastructure for all of us live in, that many other countries only partially could, if at all. The gaping maw of capitalism therefore, asks us for its pound of flesh in return. I suppose its fair. Go ahead, chase the dream that I want you to chase, because then all of us can live within this framework that I created - that others can only dream of.
Then there are nuances to it all, of course. "Does this country extract more pounds of flesh from immigrants than its own?" "Do the laws favor the white more than the black-brown-blue etc., the heterosexual more than others, etc. etc." I am not getting into any of that.
Especially since, I have been, like you I suppose, scared, delighted, humbled, and brainwashed into submission. I have told myself that I cannot complain, because I come from a land where old ladies scoured pantries of the rich for stale food to give their children, where grown children of middle-class families live in a perpetual humdrum with just enough from one week to the next, one year to the next, if they don't get caught in some honor murder/rape situation that is.
What about though, the narrow sliver of possibility, that may be, just maybe, a chance to breathe out of "its" grasp may actually be a good thing, for everyone.
Life gets in the way, and my storm of completely futile and intense thoughts rages on. And I, once again, make fake peace with the fact that most of my time, the time I use to see, feel, touch and taste this world, the hours I am allotted in this world - my time, actually isn't mine at all. What would I do with my time if it was truly mine ? I would write, write for hours on end, and read. I would ride my bicycle, read, write, play a guitar,travel, sing, spend time with people I love, laugh and smile - and do it all over again. That is of course, if this whole world wasn't organized around buying and selling each other's time.
In some alternate universe, I want to believe doing what feels true to my skin won't require as much validation. The world would just let me be, and won't need me to be entitled or rich to buy my own time from it.
Said George Saunders “I saw the peculiar way America creeps up on you if you don’t have anything.It’s never rude. It’s just, Yes, you do have to work 14 hours. And yes, you do have to ride the bus home. You’re now the father of two and you will work in that cubicle or you will be dishonored. Suddenly the universe was laden with moral import, and I could intensely feel the limits of my own power. We didn’t have the money, and I could see that in order for me to get this much money, I would have to work for this many more years. It was all laid out in front of me, and suddenly absurdism wasn’t an intellectual abstraction, it was actually realism. You could see the way that wealth was begetting wealth, wealth was begetting comfort — and that the cumulative effect of an absence of wealth was the erosion of grace.”
Then there are nuances to it all, of course. "Does this country extract more pounds of flesh from immigrants than its own?" "Do the laws favor the white more than the black-brown-blue etc., the heterosexual more than others, etc. etc." I am not getting into any of that.
Especially since, I have been, like you I suppose, scared, delighted, humbled, and brainwashed into submission. I have told myself that I cannot complain, because I come from a land where old ladies scoured pantries of the rich for stale food to give their children, where grown children of middle-class families live in a perpetual humdrum with just enough from one week to the next, one year to the next, if they don't get caught in some honor murder/rape situation that is.
What about though, the narrow sliver of possibility, that may be, just maybe, a chance to breathe out of "its" grasp may actually be a good thing, for everyone.
