I am always grateful to catch up with close friends.
Yesterday i spoke over the phone with one of the closer ones, a friend since the early years of grade school who recently returned from Kenya where we he has been teaching the movement arts to children in various orphanages around the country.
I could tell in his voice during the start of the conversation that something was off and we very quickly stepped from “the weather” to discuss what was up.
He began describing how in returning to his place of employment at a local brew-house on the West Coast he was finding very little of importance, a stark contrast to his last several months.
Tending the bar, customers would order something like a $7 craft bear and a $5 side of pretzels which would have been a large enough budget to accommodate his entire day in Kenya including his overhead at the shelter where he was staying as well as breakfast, lunch, and dinner for himself and his volunteer colleagues.
Even the smalltalk which followed as he’d pour and serve the beer now felt even more meaningless, what’s there to talk about?
“Your beer + pretzel = one full day of service for the greater good. Enjoy it, I guess, cuz I’m stuck here pourin’ it instead of working with kids who would LITERALLY be getting high off rags soaked in jet fuel and bottles of glue if I weren’t there sharing with them what brings me joy.”
I know my buddy isn’t the only one who has felt this culture shock returning to the United Bubble of America. Although I have not traveled frequently beyond the borders of this Country I’ve wrestled with similar emotions derived from a more socio-economic set of experiences, especially now that I consciously live well below the threshold of poverty and have deviated as far as possible from consumer culture.
I shared with my friend an analogy which came to me the other day. He found it to be relevant so I thought I’d share it here. It goes something like this …
Have you ever been invited to a party and/or social gathering and arrived slightly late to find a majority of the crowd already intoxicated?
Maybe you didn’t really want to go to the event, but felt obligated, in either case you’ve arrived sober and getting hammered was not on your agenda for evening. You showed up anyways because it was expected of you and was the “thing to do.”
Then there’s that guy (or gal) that comes stumbling up, “Heyyyy man! Whattt’s good! First round’s on me! I’m out back on the (hiccup) patio – come on oooover!”
Eyes slightly focused to the left of where you’re standing, this individual can barely communicate a sentence in a language used daily for decades. Fucking great.
You slowly meander through the crowd, eyes scanning for someone you might know and/or another human that seems to be in a similar state of mind as yourself.
Eventually arriving out back, you slowly muster the courage for the shot of vodka and try to drop the sensation that this is the last place you want to be at this exact moment. With a cheers the shot goes back and the usual bull-shit back-and-forth commences; Weather, sports, Netflix, corporate job, promotion, new kicks, new car …
Slowly but surely as the first shot’s effects ripple through you’re starting to get back on the band-wagon and maybe the conversations start to seem interesting as sobriety falls to the wayside and the blanket of drunkenness descends you into the state of mind where everyone else seems to be.
Of course, by end of the night Johnny has thrown up all over the back patio, Jenny has crashed her car on the way home, you’ve cracked the screen on your phone and the whole next day is spent endeavoring to un-poison your body. You can’t even recall the premise of the one-hour conversation with Timmy as you polished off the last bottle of Jack even though it seemed like the most important thing in the world at the time …
Feel me?
I find this to be an extremely close parallel to what I experience when I’m back in “the real world.” 9 of 10 things discussed just don’t matter.
Nah man, sorry, I haven’t seen the latest season of X … Nah, I don’t have a ‘job’ as I refuse to participate in this system of destruction we’ve designed … Oh, nice car dude, that 2018 is a real stunner! How do you change the battery?
I am of the mind that our westernized society is drunk, often literally, but certainly metaphorically. Our minds are intoxicated daily with extremely powerful sedatives: advertising, entertainment, consumerism, careers, polarized debates that leave both sides feeling like they’ve made their own points and are content with neither compromise nor progress on the issue … Anything to take away from the now.
As I work to strip back the years of indoctrination into this drunken dissonance I spend my days in pursuit of joy and truth. By joy, I do not mean “happiness” and by truth I do not mean what the history book states.
I know the moment I’m around someone in pursuit of something other than the above; money, power, financial stability, getting laid, having the next “thing.” It is, to me, unbearable. It is exactly like the intoxicated homie running up at the party slurring his words; we are on separate wavelengths operating at different frequencies. Destructive interference.
All I want to do is ask this person to sit, sit for five hours on a rock away from any sound but those of nature. Sit until the last pharmaceutical wears off and he/she wants nothing more than to go back and turn on the TV, then sit longer.
If no such place in nature exists nearby, first and foremost I’d say question that. What have we done? What are we continuing to do?
Take off your shoes and walk on the earth. Literally ground yourself. It’s time we sober up before we crash the car.
-aM