aberrant - to deviate from the proper course
Aberrant. That’s my life. Aberrant. Deviating from the proper course. That’s how my life is now, and how I always want it to be. I don’t want to go through the pre-paved steps of people before me.
I have no doubt that life would be easier if I just accepted some pre-determined destiny of mediocracy. It would be so simple, sure. I’m just not programmed like that, though. I can’t just get in some routine and never get out. I don’t want to be like one of those people who do the same shit all the time and don’t mind at all. I don’t want to be a hamster spinning around and around on the same hamster wheel until I’m dead.
Graduate college. Get an internship. Get a job. Drink some wine. Take a two week trip to Europe: an attempt to convince yourself that you are a traveler of the world. Buy a new car, get a new job. Drink some more wine. Get married. Have a baby, and loathe it for giving you stretch-marks and stealing your youth. Bake some cupcakes for your kids soccer team. Stop dying your hair. Wave goodbye to your sex life. Begin seeing a pretentious therapist who wears a bow tie. Take some zoloft. Have an affair. Send your kid off to college. Resent your wedding band tightening against the skin on your fattening finger. Paint the walls of your house. Cry on your kids wedding day. Cry at your husbands funeral. Have a stroke. Move in to a retirement facility where the television is always tuned to Jerry Springer and the food always tastes like cardboard. See the family you have left on Christmas and Easter, when they bring you a new pair of socks and try awkwardly to talk to you. Lay in bed day after day. Then eventually and with a tiny unnoticed gasp, die.
It’s the plot of some depressing and uninteresting movie, which would be fine if that’s all it was - some dvd at the store that never gets bought - but unfortunately it is more than that: it is the average life of most people. It is bleak and it is dismal and it seems a little bit hopeless. It’s absolutely awful: and it is nothing that I want for my future.
What would I want instead?
Spend time working on an organic farm off in the hills beyond some urban city. Fall in love multiple times with multiple different people in different ways. Spend hours upon hours sifting through records in thrift stores. Hop on a plane to Europe with a duffel bag and a wad of cash, bouncing around hostels. Drink good beer. Waste days away sitting in museums pondering art. Laugh with strangers. Have a few fun odd jobs before working finally as a performer, or a writer. Put passion into everything I do: and if I find it impossible to place my heart into something I am doing, then stop doing it. Immediately. Continue going on the types of family vacations with mom and dad that I loved so much growing up. Spend time living in Chicago, New York City, Canada, San Francisco: but call no place home. Finally get the tattoo I’ve wanted. Climb Mount Rainier with my father. Always keep my vintage Minolta in hand and rolls of film in my pocket, and capture memories everywhere I go. Smoke some weed. Read the greats: Hemingway, Kerouac, Fitzgerald. Be arrested for publicly protesting social injustice. Find the love of my life. Do nothing that makes me unhappy, or leaves me feeling empty. Be a bartender and listen to the average people going through the motions bitch about their lives. Never resign my hopes and dreams to my age; keep doing what I want, and what I love until I die - which will not be taking place in a nursing home.
I really do believe that it is possible to live a life like this. Jack Kerouac traveled the country getting shit-faced and shagging strangers, while writing novels. Sure, he was beat up in bars an awful lot, and died because of internal bleeding due to an abuse of alcohol - but damn, did he have a life to write about. People may criticize for his temper, his personality, but do you think Kerouac would have had anything to write about if he stayed in school, drank wisely and kept his opinions to himself? Not a shot in Hell. He had a pinch of insanity, and it was genius.
For some people a wanderers life holds little appeal: but there is an artist - no matter what size - inside each of us that craves it, if even just a bit. It just boils down to how much of that inner-artist we allow to escape, bubbling up to the surface of our skin.
Kerouac said this in his novel On The Road, “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!” I can’t think of a statement more soulful and honest than this. Is it mad to screw the social standards and the common, average reality of life? Well sure it is, but for some people there is that burn, burn, burning flame inside that intensifies with each day of commonality. I feel a burning inside of my chest, my heart. I need to do something about it.
***
I wrote this twelve days before I left. I hadn’t taken my medication for a week.
I packed a duffel bag and I hit the road. I actually did what I had been daydreaming about for months. Driving off into the dusk with my radio blasting I’m sure I looked like some badass free-spirit with not a care in the world - but in reality I had no idea where I was going, how much money I actually had with me, and I was about one sad song on the radio away from a panic attack.
I looked down at my hands on the wheel and saw that my knuckles were white, and that I had blue ink smudges on my palms from the scribbled note I had left for my parents.
I think they will understand... I think they knew this was coming.
Escapism? Sure. I don’t know what it was exactly that I wanted to get away from, but I wanted to get away.
I sped up to sixty-five miles per hour and kept driving.
***
I threw my duffel bag on the chair and flung myself onto the stiff twin bed, but not before locking the door. This cheap motel had Norman Bates written all over it, but I didn’t care because I finally did it - I finally found the courage to hop in the car and go. Right now, even the thought that I was about to be hacked to bits in some musty hotel room my first night on the road didn’t bother me.
I must have laid in that bed for two hours before I fell asleep, staring at the rusted ceiling fan until the sound of my temporary neighbors screaming put lulled me to bed. I had a wildly vivid dream that night... I was in a hotel suite in New York City, on fifth avenue. There were people with me - friends, I suppose - but I hadn’t seen their faces before. We were blowing up balloons and on our sixth bottle of champagne from the mini-fridge. Some guy called room service and ordered lobster like it was something off the dollar menu. I was throwing balloons off the balcony to the street below, as this blonde girl snorted coke lines off of a Chanel blazer. Who snorts coke off a Chanel anything? It was the most realistic dream I ever had; You can imagine my disappointment when I woke-up not to find a chandelier or champagne, but my damp thirty-dollar a night room. A cockroach scuttled across the floor: that was my cue to leave. I didn’t even change my clothes from the night before, just grabbed my bag, ran downstairs and after buying a can of pineapple juice, I was on the road again.
***
One thousand two-hundred dollars. That’s what I had with me. Unless I could find a way to make money on the road that didn’t involve pushing drugs or my body on someone else’s, less than two grand was my life-savings. If I was going to make this last, I would have to watch every penny. I pulled over to the side of the highway and grabbed a notepad from the backseat. Hotel: One night, thirty dollars. I thought of Henry David Thoreau, in the first few chapters of Walden when he wrote very descriptively about building his house, including in detail how much he spent on materials (twenty-eight dollars and twelve and one-half cents). I recalled being assigned that book in sophomore literature, and being quizzed on how much Thoreau had spent on nails. A whole book filled with these transcendental, progressive thoughts, pages on the beauty of nature, and you’re going to grade me based on if I remember the amount of cash Thoreau dished out on nails? Well yes, excuse me societal discoveries and the realms of the human condition, I’m going to have to ignore you now and focus on whether Thoreau spent four dollars on nails, or three.
This is why people don’t like to read.
I cranked up the radio, scribbled down “One can of pineapple juice: Fifty cents” and pulled back onto the highway.
***
I floored seventy for twenty hours, pulled into some little coffee shops parking lot and slept until noon the next day. When I woke-up, I had the urge to turn around and drive back home, but home was too far away by now.
***
I would love feedback on this - this is a sneak peek of a book I have been working on for months now.
What do you think about it, thus far? I'd love to know.
