The spring has sprung

It's ironic how when we cry, our mouthes assume the shape of a smile.

Nucleus

I don't want to be the center of my own reality. Looking out for number one, you'll never be happy. It gives you too much time to reflect on yourself, what can be improved, what must be altered. We are all tailors meticulously working, working, working to create the perfect, most flawless garment on earth. Take it in here, let it out there, shorten the hem. Re-stitch the ripped, the torn, the worn. But who are we to consider ourselves the perfect, most flawless beings to don this garment of ours. We will never reach perfection, and yet even with this knowledge we continue to disappoint ourselves with wasted efforts. 

Whether there is a God or not, I cannot say, but I sure as hell hope something's out there. And I don't mean aliens. The idea of a city, a nation, a planet believing in nothing but their own flesh and blood, their own selfish consuming ideology, makes me want to cry. I'm not religious, and I never have been. I don't sit with my ass numb on a hard wooden bench every Sunday, praising a man who, with all the power of God behind him, allowed himself to be demoralized, hammered on a cross and left there to die. Deluding myself with holy water drawn from a sink. 

Or maybe that's just me being ignorant.

But I want to believe in something. A Holy Tea Bag. A Holy Kleenex Box. I don't care. Just as long as I don't believe in just me, just me living and dying. A whole nation of people, living and dying. Constantly concentrating on holding yourself back from something instead of working towards building something. Picking themselves apart until they're whittled down to nothing. It's when we become this nothing that we begin to hate ourselves, for lack of anything else to hate. We all fight some sort of addiction to escape this hopelessness. Your life becomes centered around the effort of NOT doing something. Your life becomes a battle against yourself.

I tried to describe to my mother the sadness I feel, the frustration at merely living in the reality that we are forced into. Our birth is both a blessing and a curse. We spend our lives looking to the future until we find ourselves at the end of the road, looking at the past. Wishing we had spent it differently. We die in self-induced regret. Our free will is as free as a trained monkey. We are programmed to want what we want. Nothing is ever new. I tried to tell my mother that my childhood, this generation could not be more of a polar opposite to hers. She spoke in whispers of a world of kneeling on hard corn, of children polishing shoes, of night terrors involving drunken fathers. I thought of a world of middle class workers working their five to nines, coming home to a dysfunctional, two story home where the mother reads diet books and the kids rooms are empty. With the newly renovated kitchen, the shiny new tiles and the couch dented from the husband's sleeping body every night. Everything is one big show. My mother told me that I had no idea what suffering was. Even in her time, with abusive drunken fathers, with wars and racism and beatings at school, I can say that our world today, my world, is far, far more fucked up than ever before. The drunken fathers were just trying to escape something of their own. The wars were fought by men who still gave a shit about their country. Schools laid rulers on the knuckles of children because they refused to give up on them. I wanted to tell her all this, but the words wouldn't come. A cigarette is just another portal to escape. Our lungs will never become as polluted as our minds. I have a feeling she wouldn't understand anyway. 

"Our generation has had no Great War, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives."

My thoughts have awakened in ways I never thought possible.

There are, quite literally, no oxfords in this town.