Burning Daylight

"If you see a shark, Hooper...swallow!" - Quint, JAWS.

I have moments - not often, anymore - when I reflect on things. I have been told inumerable times in my life that I think too much. Well, the alternative is not an option. I'd rather wait to be sentenced to hell than create it on my own here. At any rate, being a fan of old Westerns, the term "burning daylight" is a metaphor for time passing toward an end. We are brainwashed - literally - at a young age to fear aging; to fear death. I fear neither. What I fear is the relentless, pounding pressure put on us to comply; to submit to the American Dream, which is nothing more than a rotting corpse that people from a forgotten age neglected to bury.

I realized a very long time ago that I didn't fit; that I never have belonged to anything, anywhere. At once this was disturbing and unacceptable when I was young.

Now I relish it.

There is no one and no situation that I envy. As someone who has been betrayed on every conceivable level of life, it has only served to show me my own bad decision-making of the past. Twenty-twenty hindsight, if you will. But it all makes sense. It has made me realize the time I have wasted being nostalgic about meaningless trash and lost moments of ripples across a universe of lost souls. We tend to romanticize times in our lives, and drag people along with it, thinking that they are unchanging, forever set in the amber of our memories.

That's crap.

People change. And some start out diabolical and remain comfy in that for life. Reminiscing is a dangerous thing, at times, because it belies the truth that everything is a time, not a place and not a person. Those of you blessed with insight can see that everything we held dear when we were children - family, friends, wondrous times, long summers - is dead. We may clutch and claw at the blatant fallacy that we can give CPR to dead days and ideals, but it all comes down to a stark message, born from the labor of experience, pain and suffering melded together as our days plowed forward: It's later than you think.

So, I have chosen to live in the day. Well, actually, that's a lie. I was hammered into living in the day. And, no, before you even think it, it is not this "smelling the roses" crap. All roses smell the same. The colors are different. Much like telling frogs apart, from the harmless to the poisonous. But I'd avoid the taste test if I were you.

As this civilization of ours trundles toward its end, I think it's important to understand that our human lives and interactions are what civilization was built upon. It was not built upon some intellectual ideal of human beings bettering themselves.

No.

Civilization - like relationships - is little more than a silent  agreement not to kill each other. It is as simple as that. And we think we're so lofty, so above the primates. Well, darlin', I trust people living on the street more than those who have the house, two cars, and 1.5 children. And, yes, the decimal point thingy terrifies me.

So, while some may decry the lives they have "wasted" on undiagnosed mental illness, or PTSD and such, it's always important to ask yourself who is it that has the right to judge what is wasted when it is YOUR life? As for me, I'd rather live than "get by". Get your "muddle through" the hell away from me. Get your "I hate my job" away from me. You got yourself there like I got myself wherever I am.

And we still agree not to kill each other.

I get so tired of intellectual humanity that it makes me literally want to vomit. There is someone I deeply care about who is having a birthday this week. He and I have always lived outside of time; outside of the expectations of a dying nation. And it got to the point where both of us, in our own way, let it get to us. So, as true Americans, we punished ourselves, instead of glorifying the fact that everything has the potential to be meaningless. For, as individuals, we are the only judges of meaning. And the sheep will be sheep.

We all know what happens to them.

Copyright 2012 by Andrew T. Durham