The only normal people are the ones I don't know very well

I rushed home from work so I could write something, and now I'm not sure I can find it. I should have pulled over on the freeway and written it on the back of my car registration. Let me see if I can retrieve it, or something resembling it.

I was thinking about the town I live in, with its yoga studios and its health food stores and its population of aging hippies and new age types who sign up for every new "wellness" fad that comes along, from colon cleansing to anti-oxidants and pro-biotics, not to mention reiki and the Course in Miracles, and I suddenly saw, all at once, just how fucked up everyone is. For a long time, nearly all my life, I'd thought that the people I knew who didn't smoke or abuse drugs of any kind and who got regular exercise and ate right and who generally took better care of their bodies than I did of mine, I thought those people were somehow "healthier" than I was, and not just in a physical sense. I felt that drug addicts, as a breed, were inherently less equipped for life than those so-called normal people. I no longer feel that way.

I've come to see that it's hard to be alive, no matter who you are, and that there's not a person drawing breath on this planet who isn't fucked up in one way or another. When I look for it -- when I really look for it -- I can see the terror and bewilderment just below the surface of nearly every human being I run across in the course of a day. I look at the culture I live in, with its obsession with physical perfection and its intolerance of aging, and I see an entire society of human beings ill at ease with themselves and unable to face the fact of their own mortality. I see the preoccupation with yoga and vitamins and plastic surgery not as a quest for health or (as some claim) a spiritual seeking, but as a search for the Fountain of Youth. Maybe, if I just do enough yoga and eat enough vegetables and take enough supplements and focus on my breathing in just the right way, I will remain young forever and in that way I will cheat death.

We're so sanitized, as a culture, so removed from things which our ancestors took for granted. We die in hospitals and nursing homes so that our loved ones won't have the trauma of dealing with our corpses once we have vacated them. Well, what if that isn't trauma? What if the trauma is that we hide ourselves away from something we find distasteful and by doing so cheat ourselves of one of the privileges of being alive? There was a time when people lived much closer to the realities of life than we do now. There was a time, and not all that long ago, when, as a matter of course, I would have been by my mother's bed when she died, possibly the same bed where I was born, and when she was gone I would have washed her body and wrapped it in its shroud to prepare it for its ultimate placement in the earth. I would have done these intimate things with the body of the woman who gave birth to me, and by doing them I would have come face to face, unmistakably, with the fact of my own mortality. I would have seen the progression of the years and I would have seen death not as something to be avoided as long as possible, at any cost, but simply as part of the familiar cycle of birth and death. Not only that, but perhaps, having watched my mother age gracefully and succumb to death with peace and acceptance, I would have seen the span of a woman's life as a natural progression from infancy to old age, with each successive stage bringing its own joys and sorrows, and perhaps I wouldn't be so anxious to stave off the wrinkles and grey hair. Instead, what happened was that my mother died in a nursing home, 2000 miles away from where I was at the time, and by the time I flew out for her funeral, her body had been reduced to a pile of ash in a small wooden box.

I find myself feeling bemused and bewildered quite often by the world I live in, by the insanity of war and the insanity of wage slavery and the insanity of reality television and breast enhancement and whatever other distractions and irrelevancies we can come up with to make the unbearable bearable. We're here for such a short time; why do we want to spend it killing each other? Why would we want to spend it sitting in chairs under fluorescent lights, performing menial drudgery for some soulless corporation? Why would we want to spend it staring at a box across the room, watching life at one remove? It's something I've always felt: I remember, as a child, thinking, "Is this really all it is? I must be missing something. There has got to be more to it than this." My perception was that life was mainly spent in keeping ourselves occupied until we died, and that just didn't seem like enough to me. I had urges, always, to peel back the edges of the scenery to see what was behind it. I still do. And I still feel a certain impatience with people who won't say what they really think and won't talk about how they really feel, who hide behind the masks of civilization and don't mention the unmentionable because it might lead to having some kind of genuine exchange with someone else, which in turn might lead to introspection and a re-evaluation of their lives. Heaven forfend!

I don't think I'm the only one. If we've created a society in which we all have to take anti-depressants in order to survive, and we have to be taught how to breathe to deal with our anxiety, there is something terribly wrong. I sit in meetings all the time with people who express their undying gratitude for the opportunity to be in a room full of people who only want to hear the truth, where they can say whatever they need to say without fear of judgement and without fear of being misunderstood. And that's valid, but it raises the question, why is it this way? Why can't we go out in the world and say whatever we need to say without fear of judgement or fear of being misunderstood? The people we see each day are human beings, members of the same species. Chances are that we all have more common ground than we have differences. But I know from miserable experience that most people do not greet the truth with ecstatic recognition. I never developed that barrier, or whatever it is, that stops most people from placing their feet in their mouths, and so I tend to say what I'm thinking regardless of who is listening. This has not won me many friends and admirers. It's appreciated at meetings, but not in the larger world. Nevertheless, I still believe that people hear me with some part of themselves. And it's possible that, by hearing me, they are able to peel away another layer of the fear of connection which keeps us all wrapped up inside ourselves and our own tiny orbits, which stops us from saying something which might be deemed socially unacceptable, no matter how true it is.

I'm not sure I said what I wanted to say, but I doubt that more verbiage will clarify anything. Now that I've vomited it all out, I'm wondering why it was so important to get home and write it. Nevertheless, these are the things which occupy me, more often than not. I get to thinking, and before I know it, there I am again. It's one of my worst vices, thinking.