Life is dirty, sex is sticky but we must not live in fear
Monday morning. Nine a.m. First class. I was trying to look
awake, it wasn’t a large lecture so I couldn’t just disappear
behind a convenient basketball player.
I sat up, and with every ounce of motor control I willed my
eyelids open in a pitch battle with Newton’s most famous scientific
law. At that point you want to look attentive, but not so much that
you get called on. So I occasionally wiggled my pen across my
notes, a kind of seismographic scribble that if inspected would
reveal the true and far-flung state of my psyche.
Behind my eyes, as glazed as doughnuts, in my brain, I was
hunched over a mental cup of coffee and the VCR of my short-term
memory was rewinding. And I was astral-projecting back to last
week, trying to figure out where my weekend went.
It was Friday night; three hours earlier I had finished my last
class. I needed to relax. So I went to Jim’s house for a party, but
instead I went to Jim’s house and saw a shooting. Well, I didn’t
exactly see the shooting  I saw the shooter.
Here’s the dirt. We rang the doorbell at apartment 106. We
entered and were greeted by a 6-foot-4-inch drag queen, a guy with
what I guessed were 27 earrings and a woman in fishnets and a
bowling shirt (all signs of a good party). On the menu was mystery
punch, which was supposedly rum and Shasta, but I think maybe it
was grain alcohol and Caro syrup.
Not being there more than five minutes, and only halfway through
my first glass of punch in the middle of a good conversation about
UFOs, it happened. "Boom! Boom!" Five minutes later, there was a
knock at the door. It was the fuzz!
The Law poked their close- shorn heads into our little party and
asked if we had seen or heard anything. Apparently a man in
apartment 102 had been shot in the chest twice. I told the officer
that earlier I had seen a tall shady-looking guy go into 102. The
officer took my statement, then it was back to the party.
Many drinks later, as Ginger and I made our way back to the car,
I connected with my fear. In my drunken state I fantasized that the
gunman would be waiting outside for us to leave and at the right
moment shoot down the only witness to the crime, me. We made it
back to the car without being strafed with gunfire, yet I still
locked my door. Ginger played designated asshole, while I ranted
(drunk asshole).
It dawned on me that we spend a lot of our lifetimes being
afraid. We live in fear. When we are kids, it’s the dark. When we
grow up, its the fear of the unknown (read as commitment, violence
or humiliation). The greatest unknown is death (not why we
re-elected Pete Wilson, that’s second). Beneath the shadow of death
we live, afraid to stir or take risks or make too many waves, for
fear of that premature job interview with St. Peter.
The irony of consciousness is that we spend so much of our
mortal time and energy trying to figure out death. We created
religious models as a conceptual security blanket that allow us to
avoid facing our own mortality. Death is a fact of life. Being
mortal defines us, makes us value the moments of great experience
and makes life precious.
What if fear did not limit us? Imagine not being afraid to say
what you felt or of acting dumb at a party. What if fear could be
harnessed as just another sensory or cognitive tool like sight,
smell or touch? After all, fear can be a good thing. It tells us
things like when not to drink and drive, when to fasten our seat
belts, etc. What it should not tell us is with whom to interact, in
which opportunities to engage and what shape we want our lives to
take. But I was drunk, and these things were just flying out of my
mouth.
I knew I had made it home successfully because I could hear the
lovely sound of my phone waking me up way too early the next
morning. Next thing I knew I was hiding a hangover behind my
sunglasses and a baseball cap, hanging my head out the window of a
moving vehicle, trying to eyeball an In-n-Out Burger en route to
Las Vegas. It had been my brother on the phone, and he and some
friends from our old neighborhood were making an expedition to the
neon capital of the world for some fun, frolic and free
cocktails.
Vegas used to just light up, and that was nice. Now on the
Strip, every building seems to shoot flames and light itself on
fire. It’s all part of the show, the spectacle. It seems we humans
need to distract ourselves from reality.
I’m all for fantasy, but what does it mean when we create these
monolithic delusions? What do we need to escape so desperately?
Reality. It seems like we want to avoid the real, sweep it under
the rug and the pain that goes along with it.
But as we ambled along the automated sidewalks between the
megabuck hotels I noticed something, a lump in the rug. A silent
reminder of something real. All along the Strip, an army of
porno-pamphleteers were handing out sex flyers. "It’s legal in Las
Vegas" read the top the cheap newsprint.
Here’s something that isn’t nice, neat and tidy. Here are our
sinister urges in three color separation! No matter how much we
want our little hectare of the planet to be safe and pleasant,
reality will rear its ugly head. In life you get dirty, in sex you
get sticky and some days you get caught in the rain. Pain exists.
The real trick is to find the beauty of the moment in amongst the
detritus.
So after one night, still tipsy, $25 ahead and with one too many
fast food repasts under my belt, we all agreed to vacate. We took
off, pushing the jalopy past warp 9.9, windows down, Neil Diamond’s
Greatest Hits blaring out in all directions, enjoying the scenery
with my friends and heading straight for the center of the storm.
This is one of those moments.
Los Angeles. Monday morning. It’s raining (surprise), and it
makes me think God is drinking way too much iced tea. I’m on the
bus and something about the moment triggers the memory of a
recurring childhood dream. I’m riding the bus to Moulton Elementary
School, enjoying the pleasant view and just as the bus pulls into
the bus turnaround in front of the flag pole, I come to a horrible
realization: I’m completely naked. I’m in my birthday best and I
don’t know why I didn’t notice before! Absolute panic!
I feel vulnerable. This is the key, vulnerability leads to fear,
to fantasy, and to the dark side of the force. Life seems to reduce
itself to these small moments. But in these moments we can exercise
our greatest power: choice. To live in fear or not. To perceive
reality or not. We are able to choose our destiny by our own free
will.
Which brings me to my point, back in my Monday morning class.
Feeling like 10 miles of bad road, I chose to excuse myself, to
walk to the nearest vending machine and to buy the large hot
chocolate with the liquid layer of marshmallow flavor on top.
Oh, Choice! Oh, Humanity!
John Kaizen, a senior ethnomusicology student, is a dreamer, but
he knows he’s not the only one. Send hate mail to: LSMFT0 (that’s a
zero) @AOL.Com. His column appears on alternate Mondays.