It’s 6am, I’m back at my parents, lying in bed after a skinful that actually lifted me for once. But as the dog barks from early walkers trigger prongs of an intruder’s morality, I remember that I’m a body that must act, and act quickly.
One must lift up and make their flesh out of their own volition, only to submit themselves to work and to a labour market they have no control over. The contemporary consequences of this self micro-management are too numerous to list.
I’ve never known what I want to do, but I’ve known where I don’t want to end up – made waste of.
I pick up a reprint of an 100 year old map of the local area. Collieries on one side, ‘lunatic’ asylums, a word that explains in itself how they treated those with mental health issues, on the other. Joseph’s Technicolour Dreamcoat, a song we sung in Primary school assembly, a song that emanates childhood innocence, wierdly accompanies way to many waking hours at the moment. Why this matters I can’t quite tell. Perhaps it still rings out, to ask ‘what happened to that better world?’.
It could have been replayed in this fashion for 30 plus years, in confusion, amidst the white noise of signs that has defined adulthood.
One must be their own maker. As if we were our own gods.
What I never understood, refuse to understand infact, is, if I am supposed to be my own maker, why am I then told that I must subject myself to a reality that I have no control over?
It’s like a game of of different character archetypes from whom we must choose. But we weren’t told this, that it was a game. And what if I didn’t want to play?
I didn’t want to play. My teenage social role was group whipping boy, laughing stock. My future economic role still seems like such an alien concept that I still feel like a 17 year old staring blankly at a reality that expects me to show up for my new role, very soon.
This wasn’t a game I wanted to play, so I did my shy teenage version of sticking two fingers up, and I just stepped off the playing field, and hid in the margins.
But to stay there required more than I expected. One must be a body in this world, one must be here, consuming, expanding, decaying, polluting.
My teenage eating and running regime got worse as the pressure to self-manifest into adulthood grew nearer.
“Don’t just sit there, be something!”
What if I become nothing, because nothing is the only thing left?
What if in a world that demanded positive bodying on a competitive stage, yet excreted such horror, one was too self-aware to go forth?
Not possible. At last you have to lurch, lunge. It’s the survival mechanism, raising hope in the body that the dead dreams of childhood can be resuscitated. Lunge for the all-too-familiar – the white noise of self improvement instructions still gives no clues
John B Ledger 