Rats In The Maze

A buttload of Verizon cell towers are down today in my county. The universe is telling me to stop collaborating with the devil. It has made avoiding Facebook and texting or talking to people easy, since it doesn’t fucking work. Thank you universe. When I say I need a break I mean, cut me off from civilization for a day. Huzzah!

Back to school night on the full moon. This ought to be more fun than food shopping was. I’ve discovered that I saved some very irreplaceable albums when I stole my dad’s records at 18. I don’t feel bad; the ones stored on the second floor upstairs may be ruined by flood mold. That shit is pervasive. Vinyl is fragile. Not too hot, not too cold.

Saved Cream, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Stevie Wonder, Cyndi Lauper, Frank Zappa, among others. I only have one box now. I had two boxes. The other box is either in my mother’s attic hopefully not ruined, or a former drug addict in my life stole them. That’s a potential bummer either way. Lost records are at risk because they need to not be too hot or too cold. There is no consideration for lost things. I hope some more boxes of my old shit turn up. Hopefully when I’ve gotten rid of some more of this other shit we have acquired that we don’t need.

Sometimes I just want to feel the keys but not because I have anything particular to say. I really like the sound it makes. It’s pretty quiet but also pretty rhythmic.

Most adults don’t understand kids. They have been forced to forget what it was like to be a kid. Most of us are forced to face adulthood and reality at an early age.

Imagine being so influential that strangers might recognize you in person.  Even when I meet famous people I never believe it’s them because it is real life. I assume that’s too crazy. Luckily I had my husband and my best friend strong arm me into talking to Zack De LaRocca. I would have regretted not having that conversation for my entire life. I would always have sworn it wasn’t really him. It wasn’t even looking him right in the face that did it for me.

Everyone looks older and more I don’t even know how to describe it, tangible in real life. More like real people not made of plastic. Not an iconic image but another soggy bag of bones. He said the next generation needs to say their piece. That he had his time. Old rockers are not cool and all that. They still play music because that’s what they do; he was discussing music with his friend as he walked. It was the walk. From across the street I saw his body language. Watched in a 1000 YouTube videos.

I always had a knack as a teenager of knowing exactly who someone was from a distance or behind by how they walked. For me there is a memorable way that people choose to carry themselves through this world. Some people glide, some march, some swagger, there are so many other descriptions you could use. Everyone has a way, an innate sense about us.

I’m pretty clumsy on my two feet. I try not to be on wheels too often because I just don’t have great balance. When I worked on it almost every day of the week and it was a priority, even then I was not the most graceful ballerina. It’s ok though because I didn’t want to be judged. I just wanted to dance for the skill of dancing and not for any other reason. I hate competition as is so of course it was my least favorite part of sports and games.

I’d have been a more enthusiastic athlete if I wasn’t forced to compete against other kids and mainly focused on being better than myself. I loved swimming for that reason. Once the race starts you can’t entirely see or hear your competition, sometimes you can’t beat them but seeing them in the corner of your eye makes you swim faster.

Primarily the only thing that makes people swim faster is people cheering like crazy who are entirely focus on that person. It’s a hard thing to describe if you’ve never done it. I don’t know about relating to people who can’t swim or fear swimming. I felt my first twinge of swimming fear being in the water for the first time after not having been in the water in over a year, alone, in a room full of people. That was weird for me, the longest I had been without being in a pool. I doubt it will happen again.

Zack made me do the water slide at the public pool this summer. I wouldn’t have otherwise. No one was there and there was no line. You could just keep sliding and sliding if you wanted. He did for a long while. He said on a really hot summer day there is always a line of at least 5 people.

I got to do the water slide 3 times. I stopped after that. I felt the teenage lifeguards thinking I was crazy. I am crazy. It was really fun. We were laughing. Zack usually gives me very good advice for 7 years old. I am always in awe of his tiny wisdom. I try and listen to him.

That was the worst part about being a kid. Nobody listens to you seriously. Everyone is waiting for you to stop talking so they can tell you what to do. I am guilty of it myself. I try and let him do his thing and enjoy himself. He reads, writes, paints, draws, plays video games, watches YouTube videos (with supervision) and Netflix. That’s a lot of activities for a little kid. He has homework. I hated driving around in after school time traffic. Everyone is trying to get dinner or make it to the baseball game, dance class, or karate lesson on time.

I feel like kids need to enjoy their time. That may not be an option in adulthood. They will either get opportunities or they won’t. As long as they are happy they might as well enjoy the days before money and the schedule run their lives. It has already started for them. The school time line, that works out well for pretty much no one.

Kids need time together to learn and to socialize. But they need more adults and mentors in their lives. One teacher can change a kid’s life forever out of the hundreds of teachers they will have. Imagine if they had tons of passionate teachers who really just like spending time with children instead of one or two in a lifetime. They are handled in a very mature way for elementary school; by middle school they think they are adults. By the teenage years they think they know everything there is to know.

We need to teach them that they have only just begun. They need to learn how to control their perspective on life. We need to teach how to deal with the bad stuff because it is out there everywhere, but also how to appreciate small moments of joy because those are the important parts. The pain may free us from being stuck in our ways. Someone has to teach us how to process all this information.

We live in a world that is overflowing with media and a 24 hour news cycle. We need to stop treating children as if they can somehow magically avoid it and not be influenced by it when it is everywhere. We need to teach them how to do things they really like. They need to do things that make them happy whenever possible because a lot of life will be taken up by responsibility. Meaningless time wasted in the pursuit of money so you can do things with the time you do get to use how you want.

Life is not very long, it should be important that you like all the things you do. If you don’t you should refuse to do them until they meet the standards you require to spend your life wasting your time that way. How much are actual days of your life worth to you in dollars? I will tell you right now, they are priceless. You would give anything to live another day if you knew you were going to die. What would you do with that day, with those moments?

I find time spent alone thinking very valuable. People seem to really hate that about me. I used to think I wanted to go out a lot because the grass is always greener. When I go out I realize how nice it is to be home with the few people you really love in this world more than anything. Sometimes you can’t enjoy your own happiness because there are tangible things standing in the way. This world is designed to maximize stress. Fear and stress make us buy. We are the rat in the maze. We need the cheese.

Hunter S. Thompson must have had white man privilege. I feel like no woman or minority could behave that way and still elicit so much respect. We are all judged very harshly for our personal choices on a daily basis. We are bread to judge one another, your smell and color and teeth color and size offend people, buy this product to fix it. You are too tall, too short, too thin, too fat, too young, and too old. Who cares?

Everyone has a rhythm in how they move. Sometimes you can tell they are sick, their vibration is weak. They are just clinging to being, barely. They let obligation and expectation decide every decision. I always want to throw a wrench in the gears. I’d rather life be interesting as long as everyone was happy and having a reasonably good time. Bad shit is never entirely unavoidable.

That is most of time spent in life. Surviving. Am I alive? Am I safe? Can I pay all these bills on this schedule and always be in school or a job that takes up your mental and physical capacity? Usually slightly more than 40 hours a week, short lunch breaks. No break at home from the stress of thinking about what you will have to do tomorrow. This world doesn’t make it easy at all to minimize worry.

The past is so shitty of course we are depressed. We need to be present and think about 

right now. Right now is what you’re doing with your priceless days. We only get so many. On average only 25,550 days a lifetime only 613,200 hours. How do you spend your hours and moments? Enjoying the people you love? Enjoying time alone with something you love? Stressing about the things you can’t change about the future? Or obsessing over what fucked you up in the past?