Neighborless

While working on the current project sometimes I try to think of something else that’d help my general problems, and it’s funny because there is no technology that would solve my problems, honestly. I can’t tell if my problems even exist sometimes. But I vaguely know that as one of many I carry the modernity illness and can’t complain much about it looking at my gifted anime figurines. I know the captain was shot and we’re just on autopilot until the fuel runs out. I get it.

So you can travel about and we love to think we could cook up some adventure, but it’ll crack your skull when it all ends. It ends for everyone, and now you’re neighborless. Well, you always were.

One gets addicted to online nothingness and other consciousness-stopping varieties because there is no more of a local event to attend, something as benign as sharing tea. All my life, actually — I only knew roughly ~10% of the neighbors on the block I grew up in.

For good reason, probably, I don’t know.

If you don’t live within walking distance to me, we may as well not know each other. I could surely get to know your Online Avatar, but I know it’s a mirage. If it’s a 20 minute car drive then we both can agree that’s a two-time visit each year until we run out of steam, playing it up and putting on another suit. Driving to have a break is not a break.

All anyone wants is to be able to knock on someone’s door and talk about nothing, or at least spin a tale for the day before returning to workshop. But we get pavement instead. The parts I’m in are so unwalkable that I often have to share the road with these cruel death machines, stealing life one could look away from.

When I think about my future, the largest irony is that, well, it’d be smart to stay in America because that’s who you are and you will never have your door-knocking anywhere else — but there’s no doors to knock around here either. Whether it’s my fault, or a deep sickness, transience of real estates, whatever it is: one may as well be the city bugman because you have the slight chance of bumping into a neighbor and fashioning yourself a life for once. I joke, I know it’s green pasture looking: city people are colder than I could ever imagine, probably. I would squirm around and away from the frostbite, probably.

I gaslight myself endlessly thinking that it would probably be miserable to have neighbors. After all, if you don’t have neighbors, you avoid the crazies. No encounters, no entrapments, no shuffling through cursory law wondering why everyone feels like a liability you hope to never interact with, probably programmed. I mean that’s why this social stratification exists: everyone is insane sometimes. Cars are the best solution to avoid those waiting to light you on fire.

But it’s my fault. I’m crazy, after all. I’m doing everyone a favor. Honestly.