Maybe I don't want to be Bohemian afterall

The Day - October 26, 2010
The Place - Santa Barbara City College
The Moment - the most confused of my entire little existence.

Thoughts are danger. Not an hour ago I seriously considered turning on a TV show, getting on Facebook, and rotting my brain into mush so that it would just go quiet. There is something desperately appealing about being a lemming; no worries, no internal struggle, no decisions. But that's no way to live. A sentient person cannot just live in the system without questioning its validity. I have, unfortunately, encountered too many sentient people to allow my brain to atrophy in such a manner.
I try to spend my Tuesday evenings on State St. at the farmer's market where a group of anarchists have a table to raise awareness and funds for a worker-owned worker-run coffee shop that they want to call Bonfire Cafe. There is one in particular who I love to ask about the things he believes. His name is Zach and he seems to be the unofficial head (being, of course, anarchists there is no official head). This boy is a little older than me and so much more informed. It may well be that his information is crap, but he knows more of it than I do of truth. He is an honorable human being. He's wrong. But his spirit, the bit of God in him, is dying to make things right; it is a spirit that remembers Utopia, that remembers Eternity, and he is trying so hard to make that here. His methods and his politics won't work - if only because he is wrong about innate human nature. But his motivating beliefs are beautiful. He is looking for God - in that he is looking for freedom, for generosity, for justice, for compassion, for mercy, for basic human rights. He is looking for a world where people aren't hungry when there is food that no one is eating. A world where people aren't living on the street in front of empty buildings. A world where a few don't decide the fate of all. He is a tragedy. He thinks that he just wants to be left alone. If they would just stop trying to impose their (fill in the blank)... If there just wasn't a centralized group of elite executives ruling in their own interest... If we could just decided for ourselves how we want to live our lives... Oh Zach, how disappointed you'd be if you got your wish. You can't govern you. I can't govern me. People are not the creatures you so hopefully believe they are. Those morals that you don't like, they have to be there. They protect - they lovingly limit in order to protect. If you only knew the One who gave them to you.
He would not be of any real influence in my life if the above was all that there is. However, today he said things that pricked a sore spot in my heart. I know no better way to put it than this: some of his words crushed the Dan in me who keeps watch over the Darcy and she is running amuck inside my head. Dad has to be the most powerful part of my mind because Mom is not stable. She is a revolutionary. so easily inspired that she makes romantic even some of the ugliest men and barbarous movements in human history. He is a pillar of logic and knowledge and he remembers what he knows even in the face of the most powerful emotions. Balancing the two is my life's great challenge.
I wish I could quote what they boy said to me tonight. I can't do him justice. We talked for a half an hour or so at the end of which he got a little bit lost in his musings. He said that maybe none of the systems of the world are truly sustainable. Maybe it doesn't matter whether or not he can make his ideas last from one generation to the next. Maybe all he can do is fight to carve a niche in the world and make it as close to freedom as he can while he lives. Maybe all he can do is try one of the things that hasn't been tried yet. Try, at least, to make life different. And if he flies too close to the sun and goes down in flames, then he'll be either a lesson to those who come after or an inspiration.
The Darcy in me began to tremble. I left. And when I got around the corner and safely down the street, I sat down on a bench and cried. Never, at any intellectual crisis of my life, have I known the people I want to talk to to answer their phones. So I called on my God and cried some more. My insides are shaken and I don't know exactly what to do. I need to know more, I need to have more answers. What can I say to him, and to the others like him who have yet to become part of my story? I couldn't do it by myself in the first place added to which is a handicap deliberately set up by my Jesus.
"For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing... For it is written, 'I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.'"
As Alicia would say... "What the world?"

The Break-Up: Epilogue

We were right to fall in love. He and I, children though we were, though we are, we were right. We didn't choose each other haphazardly. We knew that there was something to be found here that was nowhere else. It may have been foolishness, but it wasn't crazy. There was something to be found. We had a meeting of minds and hearts, in some ways. He couldn't go with me everywhere my mind went and he wouldn't go anywhere new or difficult. But he met me sometimes. "And I won't regret, because you can grow flowers from where dirt used to be."

Our Horror Unfounded?

Dear Friend, please do not take this post too seriously. Remember and believe that I will never leave the Island, never forget the way, and never become as ordinary as Jenkins minor. However, I think the terror to which we cling bears questioning. Consider the moment in Finding Neverland when George grows up. He worries about his mother in a very mature sort of way and J.M. Barrie says, "Magnificent. The boy is gone. Somewhere in the last thirty seconds, you've become a grown-up." He tells George that he should be the one to talk to his mother about her illness. George says, "But I don't what to say" and J.M. Barrie replies, "You'll do fine. You'll do just fine."

I live four hours away from the nearest grown-up who cares about me. And I'm doing fine. I'm doing just fine. Sometimes I am afraid and often am I lonely. But some days I walk around and think, "Gosh, this is sort of easy," and have to think real hard to remember what it was that I was afraid of. Be brave, friend. Bedford Falls is an imaginary place. Neverland is not. But neither of them can take us away unless we go there on purpose. You'll do fine, I promise.

Let's make a new place, a new way to be. Let's be betwixt-betweens, like Peter. We'll think like grown-ups and laugh like children. How about it?