Intelligent Man, Stupid Animal

Some careful life observations last night with my best friend. Of course, these observations were made under the influence of Moons Over My Hammy, so take that for what you will.

Human are interested in progress -- personal progress if not social progress -- and that progress is itself defined by struggle. Whether that struggle is an obstacle overcome or a pain endured is not fully distinguishable by our sense of pride, although I suppose that if you have more of the latter than the former, you'd burn out pretty quickly.

My friend and I are in quite different circumstances. He's a married man with a lovely wife, a steady job, and a pleasant home. And while he loves his life and is secure in his environment, he is like a tree growing indoors. He does not feel trapped, merely confined by the placement of his roots, with a ceiling above his head where the sky used to be. Now his limbs feel stunted, his leaves without air, and the twigs from the branches are searching the walls attempting to find cracks. Because his life is so structured, it does not lend to troubles which would lend themselves to progress.

I'm a single guy with a troubled romantic history, a somewhat tentative job, and an apartment by the freeway. While I am not desperately at odds with any of these things, they do color my world. The result of a break up that happened over a year ago was a nearly complete blindness to movement. The pain of the break up not being nearly as significant as the continued love for this woman and a lack of belief in a future emotion as powerful. It is as if the sun stopped setting, and I was in its presence always, and happy. Suddenly it disappeared before my eyes, and I found I could no longer see the stars that came before it and, worse, could no longer care that they weren't there.

Despite our differing circumstances, our dilemmas are both existentially troubling, and what is lacking in both our lives is cosmically similar. My friend and I are both self-assessing, self-improving, consumers of truth. We both, in our own ways, lack the resources and time and circumstantial justification to pursue that truth. We both feel present in a society that does not easily permit our need for the varied and random life experiences which would lend themselves to struggle and progress. We have minds obsessed with a growth, and that growth does not seem immediately possible and we begin to question if others live their life without it. He is bouncing off the white walls of a room with no doors, lit by fluorescence, wondering if he should even be asking for a window. I am stumbling blindly in the dark groping for a path, fairly certain that whatever path I find will lead me to another nowhere.

For the time being, we wait. We wonder if there is a struggle in waiting, if there is something to be learned there or something to grow on. We repeat the exercises of past inspirations, trying to catch a beat of the same drum that drove us to paint, sing, write, play, and move.

I generate no answers here.