Saturday, November 25, 2006

My baby's got a heart of stone, can't you people just leave her alone?

I feel great!
A long time ago, we used to be friends, but I haven’t talked to you lately at all! Ah ah ah ah.

I’ve been reading and re-reading a lot of Preacher (such damn good writing) since I just picked up book 5, and there’s some good observation. I feel like this character called Cassidy, who manages to make pretty much everyone hate him for storming into cities and lives, living life too hard, and then leaving people in his wake. I love the idea of leaving people in a wake of character.
In related, but branching out thinking, one of the women who hates him takes this out by trying a Voodoo curse in which you fire an empty gun at a photograph of the person you want cursed. Now that I like. I wish I had an empty gun.

Why’d you wanna live here anyway? For the people and for the sky. What’s so special about our people? They live under your sky.


You try to tell her what to do, and all she does is stare at you. And her stare is louder than your voice.

Saint John of Capistrano is traditionally represented waving a flag with a Franciscan cross on, trampling a turban underfoot. His army delivered Europe from the Muslims. And he’s a saint. Just saying.

Let’s face the facts. People are not happy. People are only unhappy because they get satisfaction out of it. People are therefore happy. Which pisses them off so much. Self-determination REALLY fucks people up. I mean, it’s so perfectly fearfully explanatory. You have only got yourself to blame. Oh shit. Only one person, and that doesn’t satisfy any needs at all. But it empowers us terribly. It lays the future out in a broad empty sheet rippled but pure like desiccated coconut. It means we can change who we are, that our identities are nothing if not personal achievements of our faith in who we are. But it blames us, ties us to the one person we cannot possibly bear to blame, because we’re always right. We’re so damn perfect, we can’t have… we did didn’t we? We all put things however the fuck we like them, and then expect them to have been that way forever. But after all that, we’re still left with the horrible, beautiful, endless lesson, that we may. If we so choose. We could. We could anything. Those things that scare us? We did them. Those things that we miss, we did those too. We will hate and love ourselves for acres and lines into the eternal present, but it is now. Now we can do what will be now later, and only we can. ONLY US. Never complain unless you’re prepared for the other person to say the only person who can doing anything is you. Never apologize for a choice you made, but regret it by all means. It’s yourself you’re sorry too.

There is no place on Earth called “freedom”. That place does not exist, there is no city, no house, with an endless garden and a sign hanging on the door that says “over this threshold, you are only you. You are free”. If you like, you can build one in yourself. But it’s not a place, or a person. You cannot be free and be happy, because freedom is lonely. But you cannot be happy if you know you’re not free. And so can we find happiness in that eventual inevitable dissatisfaction? That’s just stupid. Tying yourself in possession to people and places should be a crime. It’s the antithesis of life, of human individuality. Of need, of hate and of being unimaginative. Yet, yet screaming Holly Golightly from place to bed is no freedom. That elusive momentary capture and squeeze, that emotion with no name, she is not freedom. She is a different dog with the same fleas. How many pursued men, criminals and death-fakers, who run from identity to new home, have ended it because running starts to feel a lot like staying in one place. That is not freedom. That isn’t what we want, what we’re looking for. And that certainly isn’t the top. SO WHAT THE FUCK IS FREEDOM?

When I find the place where I am needed, but free to give myself as I please, that is my home. When I find the person who does not need me, but will have me none the less, they may stay in my home for as long as they please. And when everyone I know and meet realizes that I do not demand from them, that they are not mine to need, but at the same time are assured I will always provide, that I am open and alive, that I do not the hold the world against me embraced merely live and love like a wind through and over it, when those that I love know for sure that I love them, in no need of reminder or return, when I stand and realize that there is only myself to blame for my actions, and only myself to rule my future, when I know that I need nobody, and yet love people none the less, and when they long for that need I am able to reassure them, when the world does not beg, but applauds when scraps are thrown un-called for, when I can find an island in the sea between forever locked and forever adrift, when I can be that island, then I will be free.

2 Comments:

Blogger Pirateguybrush said...

Great post, consider it linked in my next one.

November 27, 2006 3:32 AM  
Blogger Cal Samson said...

*waves back like a middle-aged father married to a mother on prozac, a la American Beauty*

November 30, 2006 8:53 PM  

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