Was wearing classic cheaply printed grey tee with pink LET'S RUN AWAY on it last night because honestly felt like running away, except nowhere to run to that I'm aware of. Don't have no passport, and America is the source of my failure demons. Plotted today's direct deposit, debited all the bills, contemplated needing my oil changed and a tank of gas and some groceries to feed the kids and I was tinkering with negative balance again, so couldn't even shift into the counting down the days to paycheck because it was tomorrow. Already counting down the days to the next one, even plotting ahead to one of those two months where you get three Fridays timed just so right so it's like an extra paycheck, which you pay your medical debt and back taxes and whatever garnishments and fuck man, is this living? Is this life? Can't afford a passport, much less a ticket, but staying put not gonna get anywhere either. America is a failed experiment, and not even an experiment, more like a project, which didn't fail at all to be honest - shit worked out exactly as master planned.
Music allows brief escape, as does all arts. I don't get to do what I see inside my heart creatively, though I appear prolific to outside eyeballs, this is just tiny little slivers of what I'd actually do were I truly enabled by life. Instead I'm usually getting choked out by it all, struggling to breath beneath the weight of it, poking creative projects into the chokehold and getting just a quick breath of life here or there. But there's not much living to these lives we got right now. The boots have come down harder, and the bootlickers don't even think they're bootlickers. Tapping a beat on the table with a pen, beating on the bottom of a pan like go-go drums. The police are at all of our doors, inside already, self-snitch devices in hand, acting like we being clever but snitching on ourselves hourly, up to the minute reports. "Run Joe! Run Joe!" refrains in my head, wishing to disappear from this life sometimes.
The fat homeless dude who talks too goddamn much and used to always wear Redskins gear was at the bus stop with me yesterday, downing a tallboy of Natural Ice, "need it to calm my nerves before sleeping in a big ass room with 65 other dudes." The bus showed up before he was finished though so he waited for the next one while I got on, the slow roll home after another day pretending to be productive, pretending work has meaning, while all the real work gets ignored. And I just hear "Run Joe Run Joe" in my head, talking to me, but there's nowhere to run, and there's no worse feeling than running in that moment of choking, that anxiety-ridden panic point, and you are off and running, and then the realization hits you that there's nowhere to stop, nowhere to land, nowhere to ever be safe again now that you're off and running. And you also know you weren't really truly safe in the first place either.
To be honest, I think that's the political awakening a lot of allegedly woke people haven't made yet - it was never as good as you thought, and you not gonna make it better by clicking the right buttons. It's a carnival game, not meant to work for the marks like me, just another American rube trapped in his cube, waiting around to die.
No comments:
Post a Comment