You Can’t Wake Up, This is Not a Dream

Halsey has been on my mind lately, her and Janelle Monáe.  If you haven’t heard, try “Django Jane” or “”Dance Apocalyptic”.  Transcendant.

“Gasoline” by Halsey is the inspiration for the title.  When I watch or read the news it’s not difficult to feel as though I’m part of a mechanistic, inexorable system ever spiraling around a maelstrom of never ending fear and rage and death.  The horrors summoned in the banality of evil are daily compounded into bite size chunks of depressing, mindless modernity and absence of presence wrought by dire savagery.

Depressing, ain’t it?

We know that beauty has not been destroyed, that love still exists, and hope is not a silly romantic notion.  We feel it in the places that a star filled sky against endless night lights up like the moon.  When I watch Queer Eye on Netflix and see people reclaimed and elevated to be the greater versions that always lived inside of them, I’m reminded that despite whatever commercial interests exist in creating this narrative, they still managed to help one person potentially live for more than just getting through the day.  Wherever inspiration and joy are, it can be difficult to know in the deafening scream of everyday life but we can still know them.

Looking for reason to rise above the pain is, in itself, a challenge some days.  While I would not suggest this philosophy to anyone else, my point of view is that life is marked mainly by suffering and only by embracing this absolute can I be made a true lion in the world of lost lambs and false wolves.  Only the living feel pain and only in pain can life evolve, change or become more.  Suffering serves as constant, concrete reminder we have not given in to despair and empty death.  I curse, bite my lip, dig in, swear oaths and live to revenge myself on everything that would dare to believe it can destroy me.  My suffering is my strength and a warning to anyone and every thing that I will not break, I will not stop, I will not die because that is their dream or expectation, even if only in the most abstract way.  My will is also an absolute, my belief in greatness, my love of feeling love, feeling wonder, feeling anything that is not corrupt and decayed.

There is too much artifice, lies and vacant eyes.  “Monsters” failing to be barely human in their pretense and misplaced madness.  A true monster would be unstoppable, defiant in the age of man, unyielding to base motive and shallow, contrived desires.  The villain, clearly, is not the cackling cartoon character behind a podium or undefined creature bent on our fall.  Our enemy sees us every day, whispering our defeat, laughing at our weakness, declaring our powerlessness in the face of grim reality, tearing at our hearts with razor sharp claws honed by every bitter mistake.  The external forces do feed this demon, but only we can see its face and know its name, hiding in the last place we dare to look.

Losing is inevitable.  Not every battle will break our way, victory is found and lost, an ever shifting battlefield sculpted in the stupidity of others or simply by random twist of fate.  We never know the rules or what strategy will constantly carry the day, we can only fight and believe our strife can only be shattered by a broken heart beating for any cause it can.  Happiness is fleeting but real.  Accomplishment has few monuments but a worthy goal nonetheless.  Not every sacrifice will be heralded in epic song and written in celestial tribute.  On the other hand, we can be heroes, if just for one day.

That would make a good song.

Anyway, Daylight Savings stole an hour of my sleep and it’s going to be six months before it yields again unto me.  I’m a sleepy, sleepy bear that has been growling and chuffling (not sure that word means what I think it means) all day and need several hours of unconsciousness to bring me back to barely civil and coherent.  I should probably proofread all of the proceeding but I’m sure it’s a concise, clear, tempered expression of a grounded, healthy perspective.  Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Good night, good luck, and vaya con queso,

KOTD