Five Years Down

There is something so horrible about going back to a daily routine after you feel like you've pulled back the fabric a bit and had a look on the other side. I remember feeling this way even after my visits home, to Oberlin, when I lived in Olympia. I would ride downtown and stand by the bay and think about all of the tiny organisms down there, the entire chain of things, how our daily interaction with that microcosmic world has become so bifurcated, but how all of our existence is hinged upon those little organisms surviving. There is something just so dreadfully sad about being alive, sometimes. I could have been born that sealion who's swimming in the bay right now. I could have been born the son of a female shark. Ferocious, not soft and weak, not so torn asunder by all of this junk we stuff our lives with. I could be in bed right now, not thinking about another day of getting up, going to work. How does anyone go back to it? Of late I seem so flaccid about just simply getting through things. I don't know if it's because I have something wrong with my brain, or if I just need to get better at convincing myself to get on with it. There is something so infinitely terrible about a copy machine. How could we as humans possibly have evolved to a life that requires the daily use of copy machines?! And this is what greets me when I walk into the office. And there you are, back where you never thought you'd be when you started on your trek into the wild, back to the undeniability of day to day existence. I don't really want to talk to anyone about the trip, but I know I'll have to.

"There is an entire world up there that we don't even think exists," I see myself saying while they sip their coffee and listen for the phone in their office. "We don't need all of this stuff we've created. Shopping carts. Copy machines. Some of us have gotten so bloated and comfortable on all of this excess that there's no hope to even consider getting up there to see it, to remember something bigger than putting on clothes, going to work."

But I have lost all capacity for language and I know that I'll just smile and say it was nice and explain that my internal clock hasn't caught up yet, and that's why I seem out of it. It gets easier, right? But that's just the thing; I don't really wantit to get easier. I want to quit the thing entirely. Isn't there some waterfall that I could live behind? I could teach english in Thailand. I could live the dream life of every post collegiate lost in the scary sea of what-will-you-do-with-yourself-now. And but of course it has precisely nothing to do with location. You can't run from yourself, and all of that. I can't just stay drunk. That nagging disaffection just waits for you, especially eager to pounce when you're hung over. I left work for lunch today on my bike and noticed that every one of the administrators was driving a $50,000+ automobile. What have we created, with all of this technology and advancement and modern life? My head is split in two and I want to run right back up the mountain, I want to never look at those Beamers and Lexuses and expensive chinese food lunches and all of the posturing, ever again.

The problem with being human is the dreadful loneliness.