Archive
03/27/09 - (1)
Getting Away
By the time you turned thirty-five, You realized you'd met everyone you'd ever want to know. This awareness, rather than stirring up shame, then guilt, Came as if a colossal burden Had been lifted from your moral apprehensions about the future.
Indeed, you reveled in the prospect of disconnecting from the world, Living out your days in detachment, withdrawal, isolation, Not having to care for or be devoted to anyone... Anyone, that is, but your self-absorbed, self-sufficient self. The whole notion of "social networking" now seemed abhorrent.
And true to this vision midway on your journey through life, You began shedding, jettisoning, severing, Shredding all ties you'd inherited, or made, in your younger years. First to go were your submissive wife (she adored you) And your five adopted Guatemalan- and Nicaraguan-orphan kids.
Next to be cut loose were your monthly-subdivision-barbecue group, Your St. Boniface Fellows in Christ Weekly Bingo Sodality, Your lunch- and cigarette-break buddies at the brickworks (To accomplish this, you got your boss to issue you a pink slip), Your teammates in the bowling league, and your urologist.
During the seven-years-in-the-wilderness that followed, You turned feral, so hirsute that you resembled the "missing link." In emulation, your red pickup truck was overgrown with moss. You celebrated your forty-second birthday out in the woods, Over a campfire blazing near the 10x10 shack you'd appropriated. That you could make do, summer and winter, on food you foraged, Thrive without electricity, drink from the polluted stream below (Your home overlooked a steep, nameless ravine), Amuse your deepest propensities for meditation, night and day, Never exhausting your craving for solitudinous preoccupation,
Was an astonishing thing of sheer and unadulterated wonderment. To exist completely outside society And not miss the companionship of mankind and all his folly, To idle your time away, in a state of fulfilling emptiness, Was bliss you never could have anticipated.
For your latter thirty-five years, you were an island unto yourself... Until one day, of a disruptive sudden, you were struck dumb, numb, And descended into negativity, despair, debilitating paralysis, As death introduced you to the afterlife's billions-strong throng. Where in the hell could you go, now, to get away from it all?
03/27/09 - (1)
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