Standing in the warmth of the 5th-floor elevator lobby looking out the bullshit window at the south section of the main body of campus, listening to Lennon pretending to struggle to remember how to play "Working Class Hero," it occurs to me that...
I hitchhiked from Athens, Georgia to Charlotte, North Carolina when I was 24 years old. I had just finished reading Louis L'Amour's autobiography Education of a Wandering Man. Read it. Long tracts just listing books he read during particular periods in life. It doesn't read so much differently from Kerouac's On the Road, but it is a little more consistent, if in nothing more than narrative quality. Now I sit in a cubicle at UALR and teach composition in a department that has been wrested from English literature studies in an ugly divorce that took place in a generation of thinkers before mine, getting paid and drinking wine, and by god, hitchhiking was better. By far. I was alive, and I was my own. And the best part of driving is getting off in the wrong direction, wondering what might happen if I don't get back on track.
I had some excuse for love at one point, besides that for the air and trees, and the sounds that drive me in the night, and it had no right to make sense. There was nothing correct about it. It was a sickness, and it was a disgusting display of ignorance. I made myself look like a fool, and I smoked cigarettes while I was doing it. And I'm even okay with that now. It's different now, but the thing is, at least I felt something then. Amidst a sea of boring rationality, the irrational was what moved me, and I was even on to something. Might have stayed away. Might have kept traveling. Might have sung more clearly and written better songs. Might have gotten high less and spent more time listening to others' music. Might have paid attention when they sang rather than just waiting for my turn to hold the guitar. Want to be young and do stupid things. Want to look forward to hits of acid and wonder what music festivals are like. Want to hear the sound of an acoustic guitar in a culture where it's neither pretentious nor obsolete. I want to be have carnal fears like, "How long will I be out of water?" and "Will a car stop for me before it gets too cold and dark to keep walking?"
So, the truth is, Fuck You. I mean the general You. I'm not above lying, or being selfish, or walking away from any job or any relationship. I will abandon my own mother to feel in touch with the world again, to feel like we are moving together toward a common goal, and with a common purpose. Any kind of teleology. Fuck. I stopped making good music when I stopped believing in good music when I stopped caring. Now I'm just boring and I complain. And upon reflection, I don't really have a lot of good friends all over the country, because I stop talking to them or I piss them off before I have a chance to stop talking to them. What I remember as faded friendships, upon further reflection, turn out to be rooted in awkward circumstances that were caused by me and never resolved.
I left my heart out on the side of the highway somewhere along the Carolina states' border, and I brought my head back with me. But my head is a nerd with no direction. I read, I learn, and I regurgitate - hell, I even develop some theory and dispense it, but it's goddamn meaningless. There was a time before we knew that blood circulated in the veins. Before that, for all we knew it just sat there and congealed. Well, apparently it does. The creeping, gradual descent into tedium that I heard so much about as a boy, that phenomenon that would never happen to me, well, it's happening, and I can look at it, and scream at it, and complain about it, but for all my songs and all my walking and all of my reading and fucking and crying and smoking and... I haven't the slightest idea how to stop it, or even how to slow it down.
If you don't have a home of your own, if the colleges won't accept you and one of your shoes is broken, if you have a shit job that you don't care about and that pays minimum wage and the customers are all fuckholes, if you have dark circles around your eyes and you have every desire to drink but no desire to copulate, if cigarettes taste bad but music is rich and decadent, and you just can't for the life of you seem to find a destination, take a deep deep breath and savor it. Keep your hair long and your eyes rolled all the way back in your sockets. Keep looking inward as long as you can, because when you don't pay attention to all the gnarly folks parading around in there, they vacate and pretty soon the only "I" you have is held up against cultural definitions, and the history of philosophical theory, and Descartes, and Kant, and Sartres, and it loses substance. And inside, the gnarlies are dead. You become empty. And you fill the void with cheesecake.
Jesus. I'm getting fat.
