The Sleeper lies Dreaming
Current Music: Muse – Muscle Museum
I’m ‘on the road’ in my head again late at night. For the past three weeks it’s been a haze of time-shifting madness. The fear has wrung my head for another bout of the shakes and my only desire is to hop in a big old car and drive for the border.
Who would have thought that in this 21st century post 9/11 madness that a man living north of the Canada/US border would ever want to step back into the quagmire of US cities and soil. Yet I do. That Kerouac instinct to run from the city you live and find what lies out there for a fresh start and fresh voices leads me on in hopes of a better life. I feed off experience and interaction and I’ve had anything but that in the last few years. The city here is dying. Sure, it’s prospering and a lot of people are moving in, but the hearts of the people in the city are growing cold. It’s just the prenatal instinct of bringing up a nuclear family in a thriving town that moves these people – there is no artistic expression in their conquests. They are Cockroaches picking up the scraps of an excess of food. Can anyone see what the strings behind the curtain are orchestrating?
The only solace that lies with me currently is a stretch of Tom Waits music at 3 in the morning, some vodka and a mad dance and rush of typing.
Life can be mad like this for a man living between the past and the future in the wake of the death of political freedom. The dream is dead and we few are now but lost dreamers facing a nightmare.
There was a time when Land was advertised in Canada as free to those who would use it from anywhere in the world. There was a time when this was a place of prosperity for locals and foreigners alike. Now, along the coast in the city of Vancouver where I live, the only hope for a future lies in selling yourself out into the business world and gambling away what you have left in life. School tells where you come from and your pay stub tells you where you’re headed. If you don’t fit perfectly in the machine, you’re thrown to the curb.
Hard work doesn’t get you very far anymore without a voice in your ear telling you where to go. The free-spirited are usually left to rot alone in their rented apartments sounding out to the masses like a man speaking in tongues. People do not want to hear it unless it’s tailored with entertainment weekly information. When will the eyes of the 60’s and 70’s return to the youth of our generation. How much more of our rights do we need to pawn off for a new toy?
I’m packing up from this routine and going back to where the mistakes of my life were made – back to when I was hopeful again. Journalism always spoke fondly to me and made me feel happy with myself but certain events dragged from the past scared a younger me. A little neglect and a lot of pessimism can do that to a person, but one might say that is what separates the weak from the strong.
I moved it at the wrong time. I was thrown into the 21st Century with 9/11 happening in my first week of college. I watched the chaos at the airports through a camera lens shaking at the prospects and thinking that people need to question and know what is happening. We all failed each other and ourselves in the wake of that fear. Yet almost 7 years later, very few have woken up. Our political freedoms like open like the aftermath of New Orleans.
We are mute.
It’s time to rise up from isolation and to speak out against what’s going on around me. I’m going back and this time, I’m going to drive, drive, and drive towards that distant home out across the horizon. No more excuses and no more hiding. It’s time to contribute again.
Leave a Reply