Wavelength

The Eagle's knew what they were doing when they came up with the song Hotel California. Nearly a decade has passed since I moved out to this 'Golden State' and all I can think about is escaping it. Somehow, no matter how isolated and weary I become - the more endearing I seem to my friends. I am entertainment, a distraction, something to shudder about when they are alone together, the poster child for the dangers of independent thought, the emperor penguin standing alone in the vast arctic wasteland of sugar coated neural atrophy. No matter what I do, no matter what I say, no matter what I don't do, no matter what I don't say - my friends are still there for me. Some one will give me a call and see where my head is at. No matter how twisted I become. No matter how much I complain. It doesn't seem to matter. If one line of friends burns out and leaves my radar screen blank with the darkness of emptiness then soon enough some cat will fill the void. It could be a blast from the past or it could be some one I've never met. They will know my name though. The one constant that I can now count on is there will not be a beautiful woman who becomes mesmerized by my nonexistent charisma. No. There will not be a gorgeous female who succumbs to my self delusional animal magnetism. The one thing that I can count on is that I will be the only one in my bed. No matter how cold it gets. No matter how much I burn for some honey to get horizontal with, in the end, it will be just me and my book and maybe a couple ants. Welcome to my Hotel California. I can look but I cannot touch.
Maybe I am just too weird. I have no vices. I practice tai chi. I have no career. I ride a black beam. All around me everyone smokes or drinks or finds other ways to bury their time into the shifting sands of amnesia. Everyone finds some one to pair up with. They enjoy my company as they put their arms around eachother and smile knowingly, knowing that there will be a warm body to cuddle with in an hour or so. A warm body of contours to explore and for their own body to be lewis and clarked and louisiana purchased for a song and a dance. Sometimes I just want to scream and put my fist thru the liquid wall with the frustration of a surfer that never gets a wave. He gets to paddle around and watch others be in the right place at the right time while he paddles and kicks to no avail. It doesn't matter what he does. The women pass him by. They sense his attraction saturated in wilderness with their radar detecting temporal lobes. They slip around him, avoid eye contact, bypass his off topic attempts to strike up off beat conversation. They are experts in avoidance. And so he is left alone, bau; some how managing a front row seat to better see what he is missing. But what is he missing anyway? Each woman is a carefully constructed man trap. A biological time bomb set to implode once a month. But these moon driven puctuations are just the preliminaries. Sin tax. Just a warm up drill. A rehearsal. The show really begins when life is created. The zygote becomes an embryo. Then the metamorphisis begins the lover is now a mother and the male is now a horse with a bit in his mouth attached to reigns. A saddle has been placed on his back and he is pulling a cart. And do not forget the whip. And you better put some beer blinders on so you do not see what you are missing.
So then, what am I actually missing out on? What is really going on? Have I become a compulsive complainer who turns paradise into a pair of dice? Am I turning freedom into free dumb? Am I the victim of my thinking? The victim of unconscious biological processes that are unfulfilled? Am I the victim of a culture which represses sexuality as a way to encourage the collective worship of death? Video games for amphibians and horror for the land dwellers. This may all be the case but in the end I am only the victim of my own self set limitations, my own inability to get creative and transcend the hormonal prison of DNA which has been honed for 3 billion years or so.
And heaven forbid if you talk about something that is not on the railroad tracks of their wavelength. Don't expect anyone to be able to make the leap from the slow motion freight cars; because from their vantage point, the train is traveling quite fast and they cannot see the ground for the blur. Oh, and by the way, here comes Columbus Day and this means absolutely nothing to me. The only Christopher Columbus I ever knew died 3 and a half years ago on the front porch of my friend Daniel's house while Daniel sat on his Harley heading to Burning Man. He left a stain straight out of the X files which clearly gave a way his dying position - at least to me and this was later confirmed. Chris was a nice guy for a junkie. There were times when his eyes would turn black and he'd smile like a jack-o-lantern with its candle blown out. Chris was in a lot of pain most of the time. He had trouble keeping his life crazy glued together. Daniel took him in as a friend and let Chris live in one of his sheds. Chris used to walk Daniel's dog Sydney around town. Sydney loved Chris. When Chris died everyone immediately concluded that it was an overdose. But it wasn't. It was appendicitis. He'd been complaining the previous week about all this pain in his stomach and it just passed by everyone because they thought they'd heard it all before. No one knew that his appendix had burst.
Something burst in my psyche back in May and no one noticed. I have complained enough over the passed couple years to create a nice smoke screen. No one has the ability to know that something has changed on a fundamental level and that everyday is like Sunday, cloudy and grey even though there are no clouds and the sun is shining and a bird is singing and so I just want to go somewhere else. Somewhere in the middle of the ocean where I can surf and no one Knows who I am. A place where I can figure out who I am now without the past being used as a way to measure everything I say and do.
The funny thing is I might feel totally different tomorrow or totally different if a gorgeous young spirited beauty decided that I was special. This could cause some kind of chain reaction and suddenly the abandoned, blackened city sky line of my psyche would light up like Tokyo and I'd come to life and see the art of God on every wrinkle and every wind swept oily wave on C-street. Suddenly, i would no longer be irritable and intolerant of little things like some one driving too slow in front of me while cruising to oblivion. Suddenly, I'd have a smile for all infiltrating my path. Suddenly I'd become wise and confident. Suddenly I would not feel hopeless about my future. Suddenly I wouldn't feel abandoned by my soul, left to wonder the earth like a ghost. Suddenly, I wouldn't feel like I am just haunting this small town, this small island of purgatory surrounded by a country that has become hell. Is that why I am trapped in the Hotel California? Are there no angels for me?
The other night I stood talking with 3 girls. One asks: "Why don't you have a girlfriend?" I shuffle my feet and say "I don't know why and think I never will. It is not in the cards and this is the way it has always been for me so I am used to it."
The other girls do not say a thing. They just stare at the ground around their feet but I know they are listening. And the one who asked me is named Brianna and so Brianna says: "I think there is someone for everyone. It's chemical. She's out there."
I do not come out and disagree but I do know that there are plenty of folks who die without ever finding someone to love and some one to love them. But I do laugh and say, "No, I am old enough at this point to know that there is no one for me." I do not say anything more but I know that deep down I am not love able. I have gone too far in my experiments. Too far in expanding my understanding of our species and our plight and our futility; I am on this wavelength alone surrounded by friends who always manage to pair up with someone. I am the court jester, the juggler of abstraction, the unified unicorn, the omega, the point of no return, Ulysses, Odysseus and maybe that will be enough.

RADARSHERPA