I am on an airplane thousands and thousands of miles above an ocean I keep forgetting the name of. The internet isn't working and my phone isn't charging. I am in the middle seat of the middle row in the middle of the plane between two bathrooms that stay occupied so I never get to take a leak. I skip the first meal and I close my eyes. I don’t push my seat back and I don’t use my flight pillow. I plug the headphones into the back of the headrest in front of me and listen to George Clooney act. I actually can't really say I am really listening- it is more like I am hearing the sounds but not any of the articulations and meaning. So, in other words, I am on an impromptu date with George Clooney in the sense I am not trying to make any sense of him. He is just a figure to keep my mind centered so as not to fixate on anything. He is air. He becomes ambient to me. I drink coffee then ginger ale then I finally decide to say yes to the meal but only the round cold bread. I press a wrapped butter patty between my palms while my eyes are still closed and George Clooney is still acting. He is somewhere tropical, I think. The butter patty turns soft so I unwrap it then wedge it into the hard roll and take big dry bites then embarrassingly hand over my unopened chicken curry tray to the flight attendant who is looking at the chin hairs that grew as quickly as we flew closer to the sun. For the entire 9 hour flight, I repeat these behaviors as my nose bridge under my glasses collects oil.
In other words, I think I could do monotony well. I think I could do routine well. I can lull myself into complacency and into an unforgivable grind. I could become a bank teller at a small bank where the floors are grey blue carpeted and marry a kind garbage man who likes to play cards with me on Saturday nights. I would have two friends and one of them would be my pet dog. I wouldn't work out and I wouldn't cook well. I would read romance novels and watch CNN before bed. I would spend years saving up to go on a cruise that I never end up going on and I would buy the same Yankee candle for myself every year every Christmas.
There is nothing wrong with monotony. Repetition, even in its worst forms, can feel like a warm hug from a familiar face.
I love when people call something really normal sexy. Like, what if I just said "dependency is sexy!" It's not. Dependency is boring but I want it. I want a guarantee for something in the future. I want something firm to land on. I want to quit everything. I want to peel down every structure I have built then take the scraps to make something a housing structure that is very ordinary for me to sleep exactly 8 hours in- no less and no more. Maybe for forever, maybe just to see what it would feel like for a week or a year because I am tired. I am tired of working towards something but not yet being there, of gigs falling through and emails being ghosted, of the pendulum swinging from wondering if I were traditionally attractive people would book me to if I were less slutty people would take me more seriously. I have too much experience or not enough or I am too pretentious but don’t have the right degrees. I don't really know what I am anymore. I don't know if I am hilarious or unwell. I don’t know if I am telling stories or warnings. I don’t know anything at my big age so I want to quit everything.
Not in a hopeless way, though. In a way that I know that I can always start again. Isn’t that the most fucked thing you have ever heard? Like, you can spend years and years working on a craft that you may not want to do at the end of those many years. It is fucked! It is fucked that men felt they needed to create the atom bomb and all that other destructive crap that we don’t need anything but ourselves to truly blow shit up- blow shit out of the water and collapse infrastructures that were once considered temples and odes to the gods. That no matter how dire the impact initially felt, we can still build over it and form new ways of living that sometimes can be more fucked than the way we were before but sometimes, very rarely but sometimes, we can change things for the better.
Anyways, I am unsatisfied right now. I am impatient. I am nervous. I feel a little worthless and a lot ignored so I want to quit everything. I want to watch my friends continue blooming into something magical as I quietly fade into some blobby form of monotony that will eventually morph into ignorance that eventually I convince myself is bliss.
I want to feel like I am thousands of miles above an unnamed sea hurdling forward without even realizing it and hearing it and seeing it. Unaware of anything, just trusting I am going somewhere, gnawing with a mouth full of bread crust. I want to quit everything.
"I don’t know if I am telling stories or warnings" ♥︎ !!!