It has been weird few weeks here in the sanatorium my friends. I thought a very cool job was on the horizon and I was really looking forward to it and then the fellow I was talking with about the job just fell off the face of the Earth. I found this somewhat depressing and financially alarming, however, this was not the serious disappointment for the month of my birth.
And before you all get cute, no, it was not the fact that I was born 41 years ago this month. Sadly a friend that I was just really getting to know and really appreciate passed away. What makes it worse is that his wife is also a friend and a really lovely person and I just can't fathom that level of grief. If there is a bright side to his passing it is that it really got my mind racing the past few days about a lot of things.
First, I started thinking about a lot of the petty, unimportant stuff that I bitch about on a daily basis and I feel a certain level of shame. When I consider the kind of man my friend was I begin to question what kind of ass I really am. My friend was a very happy man who was friendly and really seemed to enjoy himself and the people around him no matter where he was. I'm not going to pretend he was a perfect person, I'm sure he had his moments of anger and disappointment but he certainly did not broadcast them. For a man who could sometimes seem very awkward he was, in many ways, far more graceful than the rest of us. I don't mean to suggest that it's bad to complain or express feelings of anger or frustration, sometimes it is unavoidable. I will tell you this - some people have a way of bringing light into an otherwise dark place and I am going to miss those random occasions where I was fortunate enough to bask in that kind of sunshine.
OK, I am not really known for getting sappy in public so I will now move on to my next point which, in a way, can still be related back to the previous. I have been doing a lot of reading about various political, artistic and philosophical movements from the past 150 or so years and it really got me thinking about some very important points. Over the course of the past 100 years there have been movements that were founded on what I think are excellent principles that would make our lives and the world a much more pleasant place to be. My question is this, and I aim this query at myself as well as I am certainly no less guilty than anyone else, with all these great ideas why is everything still so unbalanced and fucked up? Why have we not had a revolution here in America to match some of the social revolutions of other nations like China or France? I'm not saying we should wake up one day, revolt and then expect the world to be different and perfect, failure is, after all, part of the learning process but DAMN! Can't we at least try?
Complacency is a bitch!