Here's a great essay written 100 years ago.
Imagine the articles of the year 2124?
Imagine how the humans of the time will view us as tiny bugs, parasites on a world gone mad with greed and hollow and shallow one-upmanship? Slaughtering each other as a global model of wealth transfer and the constant tripping-up of each others best efforts to make it an even only slightly better world to live in? Our primitive efforts at establishing a world where all men are equal regardless of their antiquated religious beliefs or the wealth in their pockets and houses that's resulted in so much global poverty and desperation?
Back one hundred years ago, our ancestors likely thought that they were doing the best they could with the tools and information they had available to them, but still to us they're cave-men. The path of technology from the 1920's to the 2020's was initially slow, then began to abound with both the first and second world wars. Massive shifts of power, wealth, and information causing a tsunami of sociological change that carved out the way to '
The Future'.
Well, look at us now? The future's here and it ain't really all that much. Like in the crappy American movie '
Back To Future', we're always hopping back in time to 'The Golden Ages' of man, yet we're still living lives that demand we work and slave for the bright tomorrow - that never actually comes - yet the work goes on and on and then the depressing realization that there isn't ever going to be any of those '
better days ahead' as each man's lifetime of work and sweat results in a huge pile of nothing but a carbon footprint and a collection of plastic cards with secretive numbers, passwords, and imaginary wealth that dies with him. Nothing he's done really matters. A slave to the grind. Nine to five, eating at the twenty-four hour clock that counts our heartbeats until they end - with no great fanfare. Slaves to the living wage that can't and aren't meant to afford you even a minute's peace.
Then there are those who opt out altogether: the romantics who shun the ticking of the clock as their master. They work and operate just off radar but we all know they're there and that they'll never come in from the cold because to do so means they must be assimilated into the process and forced to find their place on the ladder of what's considered success and what's considered failure. How can any lifetime of nine-to-five be a '
success' when you're handed the gold watch and a small brass clock for your mantle-piece after forty-odd years of slog to some faceless production unit that values you such? They give you a clock so you can count out the seconds until you expire, leaving nothing of any meaning behind bar your bloodline.
Life's too short for all that. I'd rather fail at my own creative life enterprises than '
succeed' by putting in the hours to make some complete stranger richer than he already is. Wealth gets passed along the hereditary chain and the children of the rich therefore have something to look forward too. More and more of the same is fine when you're sitting on a pile of used notes, but there's nothing to look forward to in poverty - only death. Dying means the end of the hurt, the desperation, the weight of responsibility hammed onto your shoulders as yet another unnecessary burden one has carry as part of societies view of their life expectations. These are the slaves of the modern world. Yes, they may seem to be free and have some choices open to them, but it's all an illusion. Their part in the greater picture of things doesn't even register. They're like the extras in some movie who never get credited or noted. Background noise. The false illusion of being part of something bigger than they appear to be as one man alone. It's like being an atheist at Midday Mass in Ballyfermot: all the same fuckers who run the drugs, who burgle the houses, who beat their wives and children, all acting out their pious and hypocritical adoration of some greater power than they are alone.
One has to wonder how it's all come down to this.
I could have become a bus driver: that door was opened to me before I even turned twelve years of age. The one thing I can recall from those days was that I wasn't confused by it: it made perfect sense to know that, as soon as my time in the classroom was up, I knew exactly where I was going. To be assimilated and numbered, my hours marked and my time given a monetary value. Sadly (!) that never worked out. The footsteps of my Father weren't to be mine, and by the cruelest of twists of fate he contracted cancer at age 44, and was dead just after turning 45. But before he left us we had a wonderfully dark conversation as two men, not father and son, but men of the world. His courage shaped the next decade of my life. He told me that the buses he drove were in reality driving him. Around and around in circles never going anywhere but around the loop. People climb on and off, they're there for part of the ride, but never all of it. He told me that if I denied what I was and sacrificed it all for the sake of '
doing the right thing' then my life as I knew it would be over. It wouldn't have any meaning.
Being told not to go to work as a slave to some other entity by a working class father of children in a poverty-stricken neighbourhood is hardly new.
But being reminded that following the path to self-actualization
is rather startling, given the nature of the conditions we lived in.
So I decided to hack off the ball and chain of my humble beginnings and simply '
walk the Earth' as Jules Winnfield so succinctly put it. If cancer could take my Father so quickly and horrifically, then whatever takes me is bound to be even worse given that I'm only half the man he was in his prime. So I have little to lose but everything to gain. It's not the best life I can imagine but I am trying to make something more of my time than the sweat required to earn that gold watch and brass clock. My time is my own - no-one elses. I am my own boss, my own accountant, my own cop. I learned these things not from the classroom or the church, but on the streets and in the bars. Selling music and art and never compromising my time or my originality. And the beauty of it all is that, after enough time, one begins to realize that there's
no way back to the '
safety' and/or '
security' of the hum-drum nine-to-five.
When I realized that, it made me even more determined to make sure that after I'm gone, I'll still be remembered by that which I've left behind and into which I've invested my entire being - my soul, as such.
We all have choices: some hard, some easy.
I'm happy with mine, if I hadn't taken the path I did I'd never have known that I could be this happy, this independent, this contented with my life so far away from home and in a country where the language is an even bigger barrier than the need for a visa/work contract to place me or anyone else here. The path less chosen, quite literally. After all, who moves to country that has the world's most difficult of language and obscure culture? Such intense seasons? So far from any of the conventions I would have taken for granted hadn't I upped and left?
One hundred years from now?
I'd love to be around to see it, eh.
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