A Supposedly Fun Thing To Force In

Hello friends. I have decided to go on some international travels.

For the past five years I’ve only roamed my mind mostly. And though the apartments change and sometimes the distinctive qualities between American regions give pause so the days carry the same.

As I’m about to depart I can’t help but indulge in some selfish reflection, usually avoided, and contrast my situation with the first travels of those just starting.

For you must see, I’ve never traveled internationally, so surely I ought to have the same enthusiasm, surely. I am “just starting”. But when you roam your mind for many years, and drag your palms along cracks, I am not sure whether I could clarify this position as a failure of cheerful character or a persistent disillusionment that follows both of us everywhere.

I know, while I roam these foreign municipalities, that it is merely a bodily exercise. After all, that which gives honest and good meaning in a life is nourishing the systems you decide, establish. And while places I’ve only read much about may animate to life, I also suspect I am being sent the same as the Jesuit missionary judiciously reporting astronomical anomalies and innerly devoted to my destiny, unperturbed by the shifting scenery. Not to learn the customs and glean an insight in my blindspots, but rather to reify God’s vision by being witness to them, at a (supposed) peak of decay traced around the globe, seeing the fallout from the potency and uncomfortable reign of Pax Americana, occulte Pax Argentaria, whispers before the silent handoff to the Dragon’s Century and Guard. Whether to learn from their death rattle and scribble in my Bible’s margins or at least contemplate how I ought to further run away from this drought of good industry and function modern life demands, so one can only brace. Maybe I could bring glory by being sacrificed as another insect on a dead thing.

I write a lot, but I must confess, I am almost never honest with you. We have never had a grounded conversation here. A conversation that has a place, a levelled person attached. Where you can take what you’re reading and imagine it perfectly dressed next to the university library, to the protest, a coffee shop with the baker’s wink across the street of perfect conception found in Providence, Rhode Island. Most of what I write about are held in a impersonal heavenly arena, streaks of sand along its weathered walls, and though all the blood is dried, imaginary, the sultans still demand the next gladiator to sever another part of me, you, and this is all so far removed from practical conversation, from God’s Honest reality, that it can almost be a forewarning. The same as bright colors come as Nature’s harbringers, so one’s level of disconnect ought to bring the same weary and distance. We all do walk about in our own imaginary worlds, though to what extent and how often can make five mile walks tally minutes in sure presence and cognizance. Thus, at times, I imagine myself exiting a quarantine and to be a scourge upon those well-adjusted and living.

Nevertheless the reason I have not bothered to travel to foreign lands isn’t just contrarianism, but because a consistent theme in my life is trying to see the “end” of things. Which is a complete hubris and silly, so I would recommend never mimicking it, though it’s grooved deeply in my habituals of reflection or predictions. I can’t seem to escape it other than destroying the very idea of what I am, who I could be, which I certainly try each day, the same as holding a hammer and slamming it on each joint of hand until it could mush into formlessness. Stare at the goldfish glob about its bowl so I hope to imprint it into my mind and drown out this inclination to “cast light” upon the situation or, in a more material eye, “ruin” everything.

Anyways, when you always focus on the “end” of things, so one cannot begin to entertain the immediacies which give the spectacle and exhilaration to immerse in. When I’ll walk through the crowded halls of museums to interwoven monuments or Places Of Interest so I firmly understand I am running away from my “ends” and toward somewhere, perhaps mostly nowhere between, and nothing gained, but this could be a humbling thing to experience.

You must never listen to those who live in their minds. They mistake intellect as the amount of facts accrued rather than the experiences which, more often that not, may only loosely be translated in written form. I could write all of this but full well know it is shimmying toward a worthlessness I am only all too familiar with.

I could write how there’s never much to find anywhere, even in other peoples, because there are no systems they carry. No practical outlets! However much intellectual rigor you could display it seems you’re missing the key link: a budding junta warlord asking how to employ this knowledge for victory over the southern provinces. Or at least the prestige; what prestige do you still find in this world? The answer is that it does not matter, for such status markers are drowned out all the same.

I could write all of that. But as the same as the knitted density and care, attention put toward winter wares, so loosely threading and concluding in this abstract, godforsaken arena of the mind, it’s mere exercise.

Maybe it’s best to write that I am leaving the oxygen deprivation chamber. I am finally stepping out into a larger arena, however seemingly barren, and my words will gain some buoyancy, some weight, and while I use each location as dressing there’ll finally be something to rest about, away from this neurotic spectacle.

I am not a bunch of words after all.

Though lately I’ve been romanticizing this as the beginning of a mental breakdown. While stranded in the world of changes, jaywalking intersections, my descent of madness will hit the pavement. Talking will slur, and I don’t even drink alcohol or drug anything else about, but when I think about the typical Bangkok impromptu meeting where someone drunkenly slings you toward the market to recommend a favourite stall, so I fear the same restlessness will overwhelm anything that comes into contact with me. Stepping off the plane my shadow grows to giants, of the monsters brewed in silence for many years; to be the catalyst to unforeseen destruction, though at once I hush it all and know I will fade into the background amongst all the other dead insects.

Stretch my Potterian legs, wave a selfie-stick wand and with some shipaku eyes one ought to at least take in the sights.

Where I’m arriving I’ll leave hidden, for now. But I am prepared for the coming delirium, which seems to be already starting.

Let us both swallow the world!