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.
