I sit here on my insalutary ass, locked between worlds, floating & poor

posted by jeremy on June 10, 2003

yet not poverty-torn, swaddled still, like a babe, against the greasy tit of this vast American beast & I know that I'm missing something. Something very important, very dire. Something goddam integral & common to my barely-sentient kind. I know that there is more to this manhandled planet than this easy existence. I know this but I do not know this.

So I'm going to leave this nursery someday soon. I'm going to exit stage left; Walk right out on this badly directed, poorly produced skit of cheap Wal-Mart imperialism. I'm going to shed the borders, the blind opulence of this place like a snake rubbing off the entirety of its skin, saying all the while with my forked gemini tongue, "Sianara, sweet senorita, you fucking corporate punta, you soul-whore, its been fun, but its time for me to leave, if only for a little while or maybe it's for forever. So hasta, you conceited & precarious bitch. I'm going to go see this lying, war-fucked, trembling world, even if it's the last thing ever. Good-bye, baby."

Nearly 28 years I've lived this unparticular life on this uncertain continent & it hasn't been without its uneasy adventures but across this globe rages over 60 armed conflicts, most of them of the 'civil' variety. I think of the reality of such, East Timor, the Phillipines, the actuality of Cheknya, Afghanistan, the Congo, Sierra Leone, Iraq. All the rebellions, the slaughters, the blind & ignorant tangos of shattered lives, meaningless deaths.

I consider the exact sound of a bullet hitting flesh, far-flung & hot splatter of shrapnel, the pouncing click of a Bouncing Betty bouncing up to head level & then exploding, let alone, good fucking christ, the precise passage of 50MM slug or the mutilating descent of a rusty machete... & with these thoughts, I realize that I understand very little about certain perpetual conditions of human existence: Intensive squalor, massive poverty, widespread unemployment, governmental instability, disease, starvation, famine (man-made & 'natural'), lack of basic education, absence of basic infrastructure & public services, persistence of plunder & rape. All of these pleasant little details that accompany, precede & post-date all the nasty little wars of the latter 20th century, as well as our brand fucking new behemoth of a Millineum.

I live in a bubble, wrapped in the grace of this empire (this empire that is so much like a dying star, which, in death, expands, saturating, destroying everything for light-years around it. even as its own heart grows cold & fails) safe from nearly everything that the majority of human life must worry about, especially the war-torn.

So someday soon, I'm going to load up a tough-ass pack, stash a thousand bucks or so in a secret pocket, straighten out the visas I'll need, buy a cheap-ass plane ticket & then I'm going to take a deep fucking meditative shit-luck yee-hah kind of breath.

& finally? I'm just going to git.

I've read various books by photojournalist, travelers, soldiers. I soak up the details but I don't even have my passport as of yet. I think of myself as dull but brave, cowardly but sly. I don't know how long I would last in certain environments I have never experienced. I'm not aggressive now but passive-aggressive. I'm a sissy-ass pushover 'till angered, then I explode, profane fearless beserker. How wise is this in a precarious situ? I think that I know myself but how well will I know myself if I'm coming down with malaria in a backwater shit-town in some 3rd world war-hole 400 kilometers from the nearest hope of decent medicine? How well will I know myself when surrounded by some fucked-over & fucked-up kids brandishing AK-47's & demanding my fucking money or my life? Or how about just learning the art of the bribe?

I think about various scenarios like these & I believe that I need to find out exactly who I am or what I am capable of, when tossed to the wolves. I want to live before I die & I want to die knowing that I lived & lived somewhat dangerously. Lived a bit more truly.

Selfishly, honestly, I want some big stories to tell.

Yet I don't necessarily want to become intimate with a full-on war zone. I would prefer to just sniff around the edges of one. An osmosis of conflict, maybe. See the hole left by an exploding mortar not experience, in infinite painful detail, the explosion of one.

Like I said, I want to live to tell the tale.

& mostly, I would like to hear the tales of others, try to see whats left out of the accounts we read everyday in our quick watery news reports. I want to delve the context of all these other lives & I think, naively maybe, that I would also like to do this without being a tourist or becoming a vampire: Without feeding on the pentacle misery of manifold victims. But how could I escape this designation? How could I deflect the hatred of the blasted civilians for someone who travels to where-ever to just see, to fucking observe? Honestly, I don't think that it's a serious possibility. I imagine that I would be a idiot American tourist bastard, no matter what I do.

So when that happens, so be it. I suppose that I will have to accept that designation.

I imagine the feel of getting on that plane, that feeling you have as the engines power up then cut loose, 322 tons of aluminum & steel tearing down the runway, 0-180 MPH in 60 seconds, then liftoff, committed to flight.

The earth is 25,000 miles in diameter. From the West Coast to Asia you cross nearly half of that. The vast panorama of ecology & culture, the wild differentiation of it all: I can't wait to experience something other than everything I've ever known.