Right now I’m sitting next to some hippie kids who are talking about moving to southern Oregon where they think they’ll be able to “live off the grid”.
The tragedy here is that there is only one person I know who might find that line as hilarious as I do but I since that relationship is was slaughtered with prejudice I am unable to really share. I’m left instead with this meaningless mental masturbation.
Imagine if you will…the movie “Box of Moonlight” (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115738/)…go watch it. I’ll wait because this won’t be amusing to me if you don’t.
So now, the hippie kids have this strange, I find it strange anyway, fascination with being “off the grid”, with being outside of society, of being outside of the world. I am outside their world. I have no real connection to it other than that I find myself continually crossing into it while traveling, while simply sitting alone, since I left New York City a few years ago.
I suspect, although they’d never even understand the question, that being chased by cops, being hounded by hunger, being pushed around from squat to squat wondering when you might next take a shower is a much more stressful than just going to a job for 8 hours and then having the rest of the day to eat, sleep, read, write, fuck, get drunk, whatever you might ponder really you can do after the silly job.
But being off the grid man that’s life…it’s a false freedom, a child’s freedom, devoid of understanding of where all that “stuff” comes from and a kind of desperate longing for a time that never existed where everyone was happy and carefree man and they all just lived together in harmony and it’s the system of capitalism that’s brought everyone down.
That’s so silly. The world is always strife and turmoil. That’s what it’s all about and you can’t escape that. The best you can hope is to shower once a day (why do hippies hate to be clean?) and try to achieve a simple understanding and minor accomodation with the universe which will kick your ass no matter how you play in your life.
Maybe the thing that bothers me about the hippies is the highly rigid declaration of nonconfomity. Any group that does that is annoying. The fucking silly goth kids all need a slap. At least the hippies are kind of happy and fun.
We’re so different from all those losers in exactly the same way…
Anyway, the pixie like life changing imp in Box of Moonlight wanted to be off the grid. He brought poor John Tuturro low and then built him up again. I guess that’s the whole bit of comedy for me. The echo of the line of being off the grid from a silly movie made a decade ago happening next to me in the real world.
Off the grid…free…waiting…hoping…
That just prompted a memory of some of the Sufi thought I was reading last year. One of the ideas in that particular philosophy was that of being “above” and simultaneously “in” the world. That any meaningful understanding of the universe almost demands that you engage the world you’re a part of. That you don’t hover outside or above society, or people, or whatever. That you have a “normal” life and connections and you work with what exists and by doing so you make a much better world because you act as a kind of whirpool of transformation.
if you’re a saint in the forest and you’re alone all the time, what’s the point of being a saint? It’s easy to be a saint by yourself. It’s tough being a saint in the world of humans. The whole point of human life is being connected to other human beings so a saint amongst the world oozes light and life into that world.
Which you can’t fucking do if you’re off the goddamn grid.
Come on you fucking hippies. You want the world to change then you better fucking work for it. And shower once in a while if you’re going to be around people.
Burnt sage doesn’t kill body order. It just makes your stink more “flowery”. Stop that.