Savage questions this morning, hard and deep. Why did I choose this path? And did I choose it, or did it choose me? And who in the hell talks about a path these days anyway. I don't mean having a casual interest in marginal things, or living the Pagan way, I mean actually living the mystery in a time when modernism has done it's best to erase all mystery with 300 channels and unlimited internet pages chocked full of readily available answers. Shit is as shit is and that's all the shit there is - the motto of 21st century living. There ain't no paths, fool.

When did I become 'odd'? When did I fall through the cracks and fall so hard that nothing about being alive is as simple as the brochures make out? Why is that the words mortgage, security, garauntee and the phrases 'fixed variable rate' and 'all you can eat' induce a grimace and turn my stomach? Arn't these things normal, every day experiences? In any case, I loathe them. I loathed them like all young people loathe them, except I actually did something about it. I left. That's where the path started. When you leave the highway and head out into the jungle, that's where the road ends and the path starts. When you leave.

I didn't want to live in a world without magic, without mystery. I was tired of everything being obvious - tired of cliched living, of predictability, of weekends in the same bars and weekdays following the same routine. I hated knowing where people would be before I called them and knowing what they'd say when I did - oh hey, come over, we'll have a beer. Most of all, though, I hated my parents - i hated to see them decaying slowly as they dug their own graves in financial drudgery and the tedium of keeping a bouyant a life that should have sank long ago.

So I left. I stole dad's chevy and hit the road, and for the first three hours I thought I was free.

Why? Because it was too small to contain the mystery...

What mystery...

This one, here, right now...

You're losing it

We're all bloody losing it - hadn't you noticed, or don't you care

There is no mystery! You're the only one who's losing it!

Maybe you're right...maybe the only mystery is why I can't stand this country, this life, this monotony - damn it, it's almost a cliche.

You sound like an angst ridden teenager who hasn't grown up. There are plenty of things to enjoy about life, about this country. There are good people here, and good work being done.

Yes, yes, but it's all just a dream. We're all asleep dreaming we're awake, don't you see that. And all of us, everyone, will be gone in 80 years and no one will be the wiser. Is that life? Is that what you live for?

No! I live for friends, for adventure, for success.

And what adventures have you had? What success? A gap year in Nicaragua, mollycoddled by a corporate charity, always knowing that in sixth months time - hell or high water - you'd be back home in blighty, posting your photo's on facebook and showing off your tan? What kind of adventure is that?

You're a bastard...somehow you have this ability to completely destroy everything that a person believes in, and all because you believe in nothing...what have you done that's so meaningful, huh, what makes you such an authority on adventure?

I've done nothing! Nothing! But I'm honest about it - better to be honestly broken than always trying to mask the wound.

Wound? What are you talking about now?

We're born broken, Anne, don't you see. We're born into a history full of violence and fear, and everything we have to make those wounds feel less painful we have because we denied them to someone else.

Well that's a great philosophy. You have fun with that.

But that's square one! That's the starting point. Unless I can accept that this world is arse backwards and fucked up as all hell, full of meaningless distractions and wage slaves living for the weekend, unless I can accept that...then i've accepted nothing but a pipe dream.

The Birth and Death of Ben Trovato

Friday night you were king of the world; there were lights and sounds and the collective movement of 400 people celebrating this very fact. There were drinks - beer first, perhaps a little cider, and then someone broke out the 18 year old GlenFiddich - and there were jokes as each member of your royal consort donned their gowns and regalia, their jewellry and signs of office. Taxi's and tubes hurled you through the teeming jungle of London on towards the ceremony. And then, bleary eyed as the morning rolls round, you're in a que at the bank, or your waiting with a group of anonymous, suited and booted strangers for a bus. A bill arrives. You have to clean the sink. And suddenly you think: 'there has to be more to life than this'.

Maybe that's the point, that all the dancing and celebrating wouldn't be worth anything if you wern't reborn to a cold bleak bus stop the morning after, rubbing your head, hungover after too much monotony and tedium - too many instructions, too much information and only a half formed and vague idea of a destination. 'Somewhere safe', no doubt. 'Somewhere where I can be...me - if I just...'.

I like those moments. Those moments that come when you're too tired to strive any further into the halls of soma and lights, when you're sweaty and weak and the world seems numb and quiet. When all the fight and all the party is danced or fought out and I find myself left in a liminal space free of all last nights desires, dreams and nightmares. Moments inspired by a refreshing exhaustion, too tired to repeat the same pattern where otherwise you might think 'there has to be more to life than this' and then you persue that thinking within the same shell, the same 'thisness', vainly hoping that the way out will be hiding within the way itself.

The que at the bank is the closest most people will get to a near death experience. Locked in a suspended animation, frozen in a place where what you want and who you are means nothing until your number is called and your subjected to the grand designs of the Bank of England's customer service, and you think 'there has to be more to life than this'. And you leave and find another que. You wait for your degree, you wait for a partner, you find both and you wait to pay off your mortgage or for your kids to grow up and then - then, well, who knows. The destination is usually vague.

Some people go out into the world with this knowledge, that there is more to life than this endless que. They are a little wiser than most, and not to be fooled by the many rivalries and bigotries that make up our lives. They know there is more, and that keeps them boyant in the face of repetitive sameness. There are those people, and then there are the people for whom the idea is not enough: money launderers, drug dealers, sociopaths and priests. They share an affinity for the individual spirit. And lets not forget the humble Dharma Bum, unsung, unseen as he walks into newer territories unrecognised by the masses - territories themselves unsung and unseen by the masses.

Ben Trovato is such a Dharma Bum. I met him sometime during my adolescence, sometime during my late teenage years in Edinburgh. Though I can't remember our first meeting, when I look back it is as though he was always there. You could call him the yin to my yang, the mage to my wage-slave. He lead the charge into those territories, and I followed. He was born of that question, and destined to pursue it, while I simply beheld it and was foxed by it.