Wednesday, February 16, 2011

So...

The coincidences led me forward. Yes, in a hippy-mystical way like James Redfield's book, "The Celestine Prophecy"...synchronicity leads you forward in a moment of indecision when you don't know what direction you're life should go. The higher power in whatever form shows you signs that you just need to be ready for, awake, alert, conscious: you've been thinking about going to Mexico and suddenly a commercial comes on TV to visit the Yucatan or you overhear a conversation where someone just got back from Cabo. You wonder whether you should study biology and your friend asks you if you want to go to the zoo.

But let me get rid of any vanity of being destined for something, even if it could be true. I've been drifting because I'm lazy, not because of a dizzying encounter with a chasm in my life. Yes, I do believe in the void, but it's ruined many a moment where I should've just put my arms around a girl instead of dragging her to the edge as if she didn't know that the dark existed.

In the last six months, where my sanity has been in question, I had moments roaming around San Francisco, drunk, stoned, with a guitar occasionally, trying to figure out where to go. I worked at Whole Foods for five years up until last June. The work paid just enough to keep me from complaining, but not enough to really ever get ahead. My coworkers and I shared a sort of entitled bohemian existence where nights out drinking helped ignore the question of whether we or not we deserved better then working in a grocery store. It's easy to say "yes, of course. Fuck that, I know..." But this question is deeply political and sociological. What is this better life we deserve? The tech nerds are rich and they can afford to shop at a place like Whole Foods. Their occasional displays of class conscious arrogance are the bain of many a charming artist jockying a cash register when they want to ring up a case of twelve bottles of champaigne in the 8 items or less express lane. They can afford to go out whenever they want and numb their brains with alcohol and drugs much more frequently and with better taste then the struggling Joe.

I don't know. I cannot wrap my head around this comparison. But I can say that their materialism is not going to change the world. That's all. Some of my good friends genuinely want to change the world, even if it's just their own.

In any event, there was synchronicity, strange conversations about the collective unconscious, characters that seemed out of the movies, so strange, sharp and genuine that I believed what they said. Some checked out online. Others I'll have to wait and see if they show up again.

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