By JP
Malig
ALL I
want is to live.
You'd think it would
be simple, wouldn't you? All you really have to do is breathe, eat, sleep. Of
course, all those other people being all over the place make it more complex --
you generally have to behave yourself and wear enough clothing to keep from
being arrested, and it helps if you keep from making anybody who's really mean,
psycho, or well-armed wanting you dead.
The only way I know
I'm not "really" walking around encased in invisible jell-o is that I skinned my
knee when I tripped on Second Avenue the other day.
I'm an anomaly in a
city of walking cliches. I feel invisible most days, scurrying around on the
sidewalks and buses and in and out of buildings, revolving doors, revolving
lives, around we go and it doesn't seem like there's any place left where sanity
lives, if it ever did.
I hate pop culture,
I'm tired of it, I'm tired of everybody imitating something, world of
pre-packaged personality and
shrink-wrapped
personas, just one big sociocultural Simon Says game of follow the leader.
I want a place
where I can be me, the person I feel inside late at night when I'm lying in bed
watching the lights on the bay. But when I say this, when I shudder at the
obviously hip, when I get frustrated at people homogeneously nonconforming, I
get called pretentious and elitist and a snob, and all i want is them to just be
"real".
But real is scary as
hell. If you're being part of the latest trend, if you're following the leader
and wearing the right shoes and your hair is dyed the right color and you've got
enough piercings and you have the right opinions and listen to bands no one else
has ever heard of and do everything "right," if people reject you it's because
they just not "cool," not because of you.
If you're real, if you
just exist and do what it feels like you should be doing whenever you do it (and
if that means no piercings but you walk around in a pouring rain laughing at
things in your head or 'normal' hair or wearing grungy shirts or weighing "too
much" or buying a big stupid bunch of flowers just because they're pretty or
sleeping with a stuffed owl, fine) and people laugh or jeer or point or
whatever, then it's "you" they're attacking, not some social construct you made
by following the rules and cutting on the dotted lines and making a nice little
image to hide behind.
But if you're
real, at least you know who you are. Only you don't, because in this society,
real people are invisible. The path to recognition is via rebelling just like
everyone else does. Or going for the yuppie thing just like everyone else does.
Otherwise, unless you're rich and don't
have to give a bleep, you're a misfit, a weirdo, an
outcast.
Here's to
life then.