i’d like to apologize on behalf of my country…

All I can think this morning is, god, we are such assholes.

I am not proud to be an American. I am not proud of my country. And I am not apologetic for being unpatriotic.

My allegiance is to humanity, not to the nation in which I happened to be born. Not to bullies.

Nor to the president we did not elect.

And I can’t help wishing that someone would stop us.

trying to hide that ache for something more

Last night, driving home, crawling along Rt. 2 trying to just get off the damn highway…

A million thoughts going through my head and yet I can’t help feeling somehow just completely blank. How can that be?

A mere three weeks into my new job and already grumbling silently in my head – something to the effect of not being challenged enough, not fast enough, not over-worked enough, why do I still have time to think?

And it’s my own little fucked up paradox, because I know that if I’m not fretting over something being too easy, over the threat of being – oh horror of all horrors – bored, then I’m wrestling with another set of silent voices that whimper I can’t do it, I’m not smart enough, I’m not experienced enough, I’m going to fail, I’m really just a loser and sooner or later everyone’s going to find out…

Sometimes the two work together in stereo.

And I think, Oh for fuck’s sake, just SHUT UP! And then I’m back to wishing that I had more and more work on my plate so that I wouldn’t have time for all this pointless thinking…

But last night driving home, wishing the traffic would just move fast enough to at least let me get out of first gear, my eyes rolling back into my head in muted stop-and-go frustration, stepping on my brakes again so as not to plow into the bus in front of me, unable to avoid reading “The Best Way to DVD is Blockbuster!” plastered on the back of it, which then forces me to think in response IhateBlockbusterfuckingmainstreamHollywooddominatetheworldbyowningyourmindand fillingyoufullofbullshtideascrap, but then this line of thinking is interrupted when I turn to look in the window of the car beside me – a scholarly looking, long-haired, gray-bearded man – and I think, as I often do when people watching, who are you? do you know something I don’t know – but actually he’s looking as glazed as I feel, so maybe he doesn’t – and these observations are then intersected by Shiela Nicholls singing “…and do you take rich drugs or poor drugs to hide your ache for something more…”

And I sigh.

Right. That about sums it up, doesn’t it. Aren’t we all just trying to hide that ache for something more?…

And who ever succeeds? Blockbuster? Julia Roberts? The gray-bearded professor? The shiny SUV driver? The oh-so-zen woman selling meditation CDs?

And I see how it is, how it will be. I’ll just keep asking for more and more and more, and the more I’m able to get, the more empty I’ll feel, and the more I “succeed” in life, the more time I’ll have to think…and I see the folly of looking to consumerism to fill the void, so instead I look to career, but I’ll only end up feeling disappointed with every achievement because deep down I’m still convinced I’m not good enough, and if I actually succeed it must just be too easy (it’s not that I’m not a loser, it’s just that I’m now realizing everyone else are all losers too!), and so I’ll go on begging that they pile on more and more and more, until…what? Until suddenly I hit that perfect threshold of self-actualization and peace of mind? Right. Until I snap, is more like it.

And I’m reminded of something a friend said to me several weeks back – before I got my new job. He said that maybe the learning experience I should have been taking from my struggle to find a job is not how to fill up my time and keep myself from getting bored, but rather, how to accept that boredom, how to live a meaningful existence when I’m not being challenged to the hilt.

Good point, Mike.

whatever I embrace, becomes…

“…we must, all of us, turn toward whatever it is that we do want, in our lives, in our loves, on the planet, and whatever we don’t want, just have sense enough to leave alone…“

–Alice Walker, Temple of My Familiar