I don’t want to read the news today.
Or have conversations of consequence with friends.
Or watch TV or movies that require braincells.
I sure as hell don’t want to read.
I want to drift away and disconnect. Be anywhere but here.
Heavy shit’s coming down, again. Dad’s lined up for serious surgery three provinces away. For anyone else, it’d be a major-but-fine surgery. For him, much risk comes with.
I mean, hey, cancer, diabetes, heart disease — which one do you think offers the best chance of surgical complications?
Sometimes, there’s only so much space you’ve got for matters outside the personal realm. Sometimes, thinking about things in the world just gets overwhelming in the face of the struggles you’re wading through on a daily basis.
Sometimes.
I don’t think I’m at that point. Not about this. I’ve been to the sick-dad rodeo one time too many. Sad as I am, weary as I am, I’m pretty much prepared for whatever comes.
I fucking hate that I feel that way. But I do. There’s only so many times you can stand peering over the edge and be terrified.
Sooner or later, you just get to knowing what it’s like, and the fear’s there, but it’s a fear you’ve metabolized now.
Sort of where I am with Dad. I’ve metabolized my terror. Don’t tell my shaking leg or queasy stomach that, but it’s true. I’m a pretty passionate girl. This is Stress-For-a-Loved-One Lite™.
Part of that is just me being older, wiser, more worn, jaded, and exposed. I done been around, man. Heart’s been broken more times than I need to count from life and its woes. That’s just my experience on planet earth.
It takes a lot to break me down, now. I take body blows like a heavyweight champ. With that shock-absorbing tendency comes the ability to not react much anymore.
As an example, the other day, this dude keeps cracking his little one liners at a pub. Eventually he’s all flustered because I’m not laughing at his jokes.
Well, I don’t laugh easily. I’m funny as hell, man, but making me laugh takes something unexpected or just flat-out smart. I’m a student of comedy. I’ve heard it ALL. I smile, or grin. Now and then? A full-on laugh.
But just because I don’t “react” doesn’t mean I’m not dialed in. I’m removed, but I’m listening. I’m probably thinking why your joke failed, where you went wrong with timing, or where I’ve heard a variation of it before, but, you know, I’m listening.
And we’re all sort of doing that these days. Most of us, anyhow. Dialed in but not. Listening but disconnected.
We’re sponges. Taking from society but never giving back. Surfacing.
My life of the last decade has been much like that.
One day, I stopped reading my three or so newspapers daily. Eventually, I fell away from reading books.
What came first, the head injury or my apathy? I don’t know, I don’t even remember anymore.
Things have changed.
Apathy isn’t enough. It’s not a meal that’s filling. Its price is too high. All the things it’s cost me, man…
I feel like a spectator in the intellectual world, and I’m more than that. I’m a smart woman with a unique world-view. I can’t just watch and not contribute.
To be a part of it requires I be of it, that I be immersed in it, be surrounded by it.
So, somewhere inside, I feel like the joke has been on me.
Sure, I’ve survived everything I’ve been through. But for what?
I fell out of touch and love with music. I stopped being clued into the political, cultural, and societal happenings, something I’d been very much in tune with since I had my first newspaper addiction at the age of 9. I stopped seeing movies. I mean, I’m the kind of girl who plans the music in advance for roadtrips — what works with what stretches of highway, what tracks tie into what scenery.
Or, I used to be.
What’s the fucking point in surviving if you’re not gonna thrive as who you are, right?
It’s what happens to a lot of us, I guess. I’ve got pretty good excuses, but they’re still just excuses, and I still feel like a cop-out.
It’s like the themes explored in Fight Club and American Beauty, the disappearing of identity and the cover-up of disconnect by way of commercialism and cluelessness.
We think we’re growing up as we fall away from our youthful passions of music and movies, politics and society, growing jaded and distant.
We’re not. We’re not “growing up”. We’re losing our leisure, thus losing our souls, as Virginia Woolf once wrote.
I want the happy medium between my savvy survivalist self, and the jazzed-up involved youth I was.
Some people I know still balance these things well, and maybe if life hadn’t gotten in the way, I might be the poster-girl for being a plugged-in hipster, too.
But I’m not.
I’m a part of the problem. I’ve joined the throngs of the Great Ignoring.
It’s not cool. It’s selfish. It’s not helping.
The disconnect isn’t working anymore. Not for me. Not for you. Sure as shit not for society.
It’s not really about “movies” and “music” and “news”.
It’s our soul as a society. Who are we if we’re just a bubble-gum-chewing collective dying to swallow the next reality show?
Art, culture, it was my soul, it was who I am. At my core, I’m an invested, impassioned, intelligent person, and living any way but that is antithetical to who I need to be.
My father’s disconnect has him at 350 pounds, with cancer, diabetes, heart disease, while awaiting major surgery. I’m pretty sure “disconnect” is not working for him, either.
I imagine my father would approve of my learning this lesson this week. I’m hoping he survives the week so we can have a talk about that.
Either way, it’s time I suck a little more cultural marrow out of life, because what I got ain’t sustaining much.