Waxing Quixotic

I have on occasion been accused of tossing around fluky, slapdash ideas about life, art, and and the merits of cheap canned beer – maybe when I stop, it will have been for the benefit of none. I don’t deny that my brain seems to process random thoughts like fourteen hamsters spinning the wheel in a mad dash to an unending circuitous sprint. I think about a lot of things. I try to think about good things, and good people, and the cool places I have visited along the way.

As we all scratch, claw, and strive to reach some uniformly agreed upon definition of “success” I always come back to the questioning of what success and ambition mean. I bought into the career path, the security, the plastic, the food and phone. Does this make one happy? I have bought in alright, and the sacrifice is everything else you want to do, least of which is have any regrets.

“It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?” – Buk…

When we remove all the materials, the clutter, the drab existence of our working lives stripped to the skeleton of life, what then are we left with? Truth? Wherein lies the happiness in only truth?

“What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms — in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins. We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from; for as yet we have heard only of the obligation imposed by society that it should exist: to be truthful means using the customary metaphors – in moral terms, the obligation to lie according to fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all…”

Truth – my truth – exists within connections between people. All kinds of connections. The unexpected ones – with people who exist in front of our outstretched arms, the people who exist only in passing and the dark parts of our mind. Nature, the unruly mother who gives and takes and transcends what you think is impossible; testing our metaphysical mettle. It is only when we stop looking, stop searching, for that person or experience that we melt into a pool of boring complacency, like a candle burning out, because it just couldn’t take it anymore. Strive people, for the good things to you, and to surround yourself with people and experiences which keep the flame lit! Enjoy…..

-Ryan