now why didn't i think of that before? i've always been a rat chasing it's tale. in a way it makes no sense, knowing i'm made up of a bunch of cells walking around together, until they part company. consciousness? basically something formless. am i the universe, the universe me? whatever it is, i make it up cause i need to. whenever i lose touch with my story, i'm despairing, suicidal. to get back on track i'll look at pictures of 1950's paris, my first visit. ah, the world traveler, the intellectual, and so on.
even family has to be part of my story. after all, my grandparents met and were married in this town about a hundred years ago. i keep saying to myself, 'you can't claim anything anyone in the ancestral line has done as your own.' yet, the oregon trail, the american revolution, those guys travelled paths part of my myth of myself. almost anything i've done contributes. fifty years being a fire lookout, a archetypal occupation. giving my versions of stand up comedy, or playing the cockroach in kafka's metamorphosis, all part of a semi-conscious construction, determined to make me more than a protoplasm living in a swamp.
of course, that could be a my place too. identifying with the tribe, other floaters and bottom-feeders. those long winters, huddled up in a tent, humanity told stories for centuries, merely to get them safely and vividly to the spring. and when i meet an american in another country, i greet him/her like an old friend, even if at home i'd shout at them, possibly even call the police. ultimately, we feel the best with the familiar.
take the news, it's all drama, characters, threads of a plot, even being a conspiracy theorist makes sense, given this thesis. wow, those big guys out to get me personally, i must be terribly important. and this occupies the mind, pushing out thoughts of aging, death, poverty, and an ultimate fate of sleeping under park benches. none of it is my fault. we join the superheroes, vaulting over buildings in the face of common sense. who wants to be ordinary, who can stand it?
more ipad portraits at http://www.pbase.com/wwp/ipad yes, we never stop creating our epic, and if we do, we jump off a cliff, and that's part of it too.
