It is so easy to lapse into thinking that everything is mist. That it's all a subtle long-lived lie. The way things are, they way we are, it's just all laid out and waiting. And we more or less stray within these borders of acceptable tolerance. From trailer parks to Beverly Hills. From career-homelessness to real estate developer. The addict to the accountant.
And maybe it is just a plague some of us endure. Some tribulation of the mind like sleepwalking. Sleepliving? The curse of the conscious, or the overly aware. Sensitive to things like repetition and command, expectation and culture. We might not push back on these if they weren’t forced.
We rub up against the normalcy of life and recoil at its redundancy. It's nothing against tradition or familiarity. And practice makes perfect. But that cuts both ways. We can perfect becoming inhuman.
And for some, there’s a visceral response to the omnipresent expectation of conformity.
I say conformity, not similarity. Conformity is sameness for the sake of efficiency. Similarity is a flourish of expression given the same means.
So conformity is death to the free mind and spirit, and assimilation serves no great purpose other than production.
And I often wonder if this is the mist. The need to be the same, to be efficient, so that someone else can reap profit and power.
Maybe this is the root cause of a dreamlike wandering through a tepid and absurd world where people take life away for things like new shoes or fossil fuel. Where entire systems exist to preserve stratification. Invisible and also visible bondage.
Do the colors seem faded? Or is it simply that they are familiar, and therefore no longer brilliant to us? Washed away by pixels and fiber optics, living inside a screensaver. Real like a projection is real. A rendering of something, but not the actual thing.
Is the candle burning? I smell the ozone and smoke from a match struck. I feel the heat when my hand is closed around the flame. It feels real. Like maybe I should wrap my whole self around this small burning thing that looks like a promise. If I listen closely I can hear the flame whip the air.
If I lean in, I can almost taste emancipation.