Desert Lives

There's not a whole lot to say about breaking into the post-college, post-school world of what is, the rest of your life. It's kind of like what I would imagine trying to describe a desert would be like (having not ever been to a desert); it's simply to vast to limit your perception well enough to take something away from the site. There's no longer anything that contains your life, nicely boxed up in five years of Elementary, three years of Middle, four years of High, or four years of Undergrad (variations on all apply). No, this is like a liquid set free on a surface, only to discover you kind of liked being held from spreading so thin. This is all not to say that this sort of outlandish new world I find myself in is somehow reportedly negative, but it is to address the true wild potential of the new world fearfully from a cubicle in a desert. (Sort of unrelated - I heard that British guy quote something I liked about deserts in a Planet Earth DVD, that the sands never stop shifting and being blown around on the surface, but the actual bases for the greater mountains of sand in the desert haven't moved in thousands of years.)

Now, you feel like you need to find something to build up from the ground to do something, because otherwise you might end up building yourself up from underground; like if we don't do something soon we'll have latched onto some sort of greater problem with life-girl, health, career, family, etc. and there will be no room to see anything else. I mean I guess that may be the big sort of hallucination of this desert, the big dreams of youth that appear hazy in the distance and when you get to them you're no longer providing for yourself, it's all for the next generation's chance to chase their undulating fantasies on the horizon. That may sound kind of sad, but in all honesty, I feel like at the rate I've been going over this year and a half into the desert I will probably be just fine with slowing it down. Don't get me wrong, I wanna live it up and see things and do things and all that, but I feel like I already have and already am. Not that I've led a glamorous life, but I tend to chronicle things with writings, pictures, and memories in me kopf, and each part of those, every little place/person/thing was like a little universe in itself. I feel like a life is a rather deceptive concept in that it pretends to be something that it's not: one entity that is complete and whole. School makes sense in a lot more ways than the after-school world because of those ~4 year intervals. Four years is about the length of time that my memory holds up, if that. Four years feels much more like a life than an entire life does. Childhood even feels like I lived three or four lives because of this, all of which were millenia ago, and I'm not even that old compared to a good chunk of the population. And the fact that I don't even have a distinct beginning of it all, no start of all memories that led to now, but rather a strange mythical past meshed between actual memories and fabricated memories from pictures and others' tales, that makes it all the stranger.

I guess I'm in the middle of something like my 6th life already based on those terms, and maybe in that sense of things I've got a couple years left of doing whatever I'm doing now before I'll just blank it all out and start over again with something else. People worry too much about the ultimate direction of things. People worry too much in general. I like that things can and do change, it puts things in perspective, as weird of a perspective that may be over time. I guess I've just spent so long trying to carve out something so defined in school that it ends up being a lot easier now to carve out much smaller things instead some grand, oppressive Career/voyage/journey that in reality is impossible to steer, control, or even hold onto. Unless you have the capacity for it, the education system we spent our lives (many at that) in was built to ship us out at a velocity and trajectory for the sun (when extrapolated). "It. just. don't. make. sense." It's a lot better to catch those fucking sand winds in some kinda sand-sailing type vessel and just ride those suckers out until you can ride them no more.