7

He says something about how when I get older my body will ‘fall apart’. He says something about how life gets harder when I get older, how much more difficult it becomes.
I tune out.

Nobody knows anything anymore. They just talk and talk. I think of the Los Angeles freeways in the rain; the dull red glow of stopped cars and the thick polluted drops that batter down on the windshield. Each car contains one other person, held in a capsule of their influence that money, or sex or love or some other currency bought- but it’s the same. Like a three dimensional sphere of influence made of metal and plastic they truck along the concrete paths lain before them. They put their slogans on windows and bumpers but it’s all the same; the perimeter of influence reaching outward to advertise some other value, some encouragement to their middle school children some word that abortion is wrong, or which political party they’re affiliated with… whatever.

They rush forth through the city, through the signal, to the parking lot. In search of a “good spot” for cheap socks or a meal and in this moment I am… forgettable.

I don’t own a car. I ride a bike, my legs are strong enough to kick a door off its hinges; but I am emasculated in this society, the second-class that doesn’t see the need for all of it. But I do, I miss not having a portable room with custom seating to smoke a bowl in. A private conference room to call from, like a pocketed place that persists in my memory when I had deeper access to another world. I miss all the things that come with the illusion of freedom, but like any illusion removed, one can never go back.

And that, in essence, is what this is about. Could one destroy enough illusion to the extent that there is no going back? Will I reach a point where there is nothing left for me but death? Could I take enough substance to transcend a world of materials?

When we say “take a life” what do we mean? What do we take? We end. We end a life. We end a life with the illusion that there is something more but empirically there is nothing to indicate that there is more than this. And continue to live the lie. And it’s a simple lie and its and eloquent lie but the truth is that none of this is necessary. Not your car or your skyscraper or your money will have any presence it what is to come. We each die alone and how we meet that end is our own affair.