openroadsong: September 2003 Archives

i've said it once i'll say it a million times it is supposed to be difficult if you do not encounter serious challenging circumstances that test you to your soul you are doing something wrong life does not get better being easy, it merely leaves you numbed out complacent stagnant struggling to stay awake under the influence of the inertia.

maybe that's what's wrong with me, huh? maybe life is supposed to be easy and the same thing day in day out maybe it is about comfort and moderation in everything except numbness, can't get enough of that? or, here's another question: what's better, to have bested a beast of a difficult situation, or never to have had the difficulty?

now for some people comfort and moderation is the thing, but for others among us it is not. and though we may long for it even pine for it and consider ourselves suffering for the lack of it, our minds have other plans. we can try to defend against those plans, adorn ourselves with the psychic shock absorption the insulation the well-appointed interior the long list of amenities, and do our level best to cruise through it controlled but for us comfort is really not the thing, it looks good it seems like it should feel good but it is never quite right with us down deep, that restless shifting within that vague disquiet that surfaces in the idle silence between heartbeats, a sense of urgency that is all at once impractical and illogical and irresistable. and oh, resistance is costly, though it's intensity that it costs us and that's hard to justify; much easier to take credit for our efforts against surrendering to the messy chaos our dreams suggest to us. logic tells us that messes and chaos and red 1969 z28 convertibles are difficult and stressful and therefore wrong for us, but logic knows naught of intensity. logic tells us intensity is not a need. i beg to differ.

some of us just aren't buick people, no matter how hard we try to convince ourselves otherwise.

i therefore rescind all my whining about wanting to be normal. fuck normal. i'm a freak. i'm weird. but life is interesting, and i am awake, and i am alive.

i never told the rest of this story, not entirely sure why.

brilliantly dressed punk-goth youngster comes roaring up in a beatup veedub driven by a rather stressed out regular sort of guy; she needs to get to LA. she *has* to get to LA, something about two girls named Crystal and violations of probation and she can't ride the Amtrak train, it's in her conditions due to an unfortunate sort of incident involving standing up for the courage of her angry, twenty year old convictions.