Why, Silly Gypsyman? Why?

I pack up, seeking freshness from the weird wired chaos of Starbucks. A quick search of the parking lot reveals the dull grey strut-ground devoid of real space, splattered with dented, dusted colour like a sleepwalking child flicking stale paint at a recycled paper canvas. But! there is hope, along to my right it surges like the parting of the Red Sea--or the Dead Sea, or whichever body of water you want it to be--cornered between the mighty chain grocery store (market is no word for this spread of food so viciously raped by preservatives it dies like a sickly beached whale clinging doggedly to life for months, poisonous to any hungry carnivore-cum-scavenger desperate enough to gorge) and the somehow-surviving video store, renting out movies for less than the "small" cup of coffee I guzzled habitually just a minute ago.

Ah, Space to roam! I pace, circle, prance, and behold a wonder indeed, for there is even a strip of grass watered daily by the opulence of some River of the North. I plop down against a tree and share stories with my brain-buddy Mitch.

A curly-haired young man, with the slow beating of the Mindless Devotion showing in his listless expression, towing a Santa's sack of discarded delicacies, wonders for a moment at the bright-eyed sun demon with a Rohan ponytail, Desert Island Member-Member sweater vest over bare chest, chomping wasabi pebbles amid a quietude he covets oddly but no long understands. What is this lost hippy thinking? Why is he not releasing his anger by shooting virtual Russians, dry-humping his shameful lust away to raunchy young-looking women whose ass acne has been carefully brushed over by the editor? Why would a young man with all the delights of this flailing, dazzling culture before him turn away from such a curious cascading collection of witty trivialities?

It's survival of the fittest, my man! Dog eat dog, et cetera and so forth. Look around, that's all there is! If you stand far back enough to overlook the tentative smiles, so you can't hear the quiet grumbling that these days sounds like a goddamn army of cicadas, you can see that humans are but slovenly, six-hour-future-thinking witless rodents; wiry hunting dogs brawling pitifully for the stripped feastly remains Lord God is too fat and full to consume and so deigns to toss to the dirt floor.

What drives some young wretch to flee the scuffle and forsake a life of assembling, dragging, selling, tossing trash so as to enjoy the privilege of believing in the faded glory of such trash, acquiring it when shiny for the pleasure of quenching one's thirst when it is truly but sucking in smoke to further parch one's throat to ever more desperate thirstiness and getting docilely high in the meantime and therefore temporarily forgetting about the Thirst, before coughing out the smoke with apathetic contempt. Why forsake that time between the acquisition and the realisation? The equation seems to be

Time of Interest = Object Value
                            Buyer's Affluence

A lovely game, surely. So: why, silly gypsyman?

Why, indeed?

Maybe I'm just tired of fighting. I'm not even 22 and I've been living like an old man for years. Maybe I just don't feel like jumping around in chaotic vectors through our flashy culture like an excited, terrified child in Disneyland running up to each character she loves with enthusiastic joy to find a monstrous frozen smile leering at her, bug-eyes the size of bowling balls drawing her into their plastic madness. Maybe I'm weary of competing against my brother, so afraid of falling behind him to actually look into his eyes and realise that they leak love like mine own and maybe he's just racing me because I'm racing him.

I wish to you no misinterpretation, so I want to make clear that I no longer feel all that tired. Indeed, as this ranting article aptly portrays, there is a bounding energy within me long stifled. For although physical survival is rather essential, there are many ways to go about it, and perhaps... just perhaps it is the platform and not the game. The means for our jolly consciousness to enjoy the mad equilibrium about us which we will never really understand. The means, not the purpose.

Hold on a moment, bored reader, for there is a situation more important than your curiousity. A man is in front of me (I'm back in Starbucks) literally inching along with his coffee, staring fixedly at the ground before him and muttering incoherently. It is rude to stare, but he is fascinating and I am ashamed of my brief, slightly alarmed glance up.

"What the hell?" he babbles, "Sampsonite truffles for beach wood. Not my truck," and that's all I can make out. Or maybe I just made that up. Difficult to tell these days.

The wonderful thing about our current society is that anyone can do anything, but let's not get complacent. On the horizon is great change: either we adapt or mass extinction. What a lovely time to be a writer.