the january blues
It's kind of complicated, how I got there, but the other day it hit me like a glass bottle over the head (or the tinkle of a goblet): I am decidedly less inclined towards subversiveness and rebellion than I was, say, 20 or even five years ago. I'm probably also much less angry and fractious too.
This realization is not welcome. It seems a move from vibrancy to dullness, action to inaction, the violent love of live to the passive acceptance of death.
Because the opposite of the subversive spirit is to be docile, obedient, compliant, etc. It is to read the newspaper and find myself more ambivalent than agitated, more disinterested than disturbed. I feel medicated. House-broken. Like a cow pushed to the edge of a field by the wind. Like a fish that doesn't bother to swim against the current.
It's not a nice feeling. For me, anyway. It leaves me feeling almost desperate to piss someone off--through active not passive aggression, that much is clear--and that in doing so I'll recapture something lost--mojo, I guess. Or the reminder that I'm alive.
Except that everything I written doesn't quite explain how I'm feeling. It's only accurate, sort of. It's not fully true.
But it could be true. If I were a writer I might describe a character that way, and when interviewed I would feel truthful in either denying or acknowledging that I was writing autobiographically.
And so that's where I am.
Swimming. In circles. Sort of.
...
It's cold today. Twenty degrees. Skiing later with Audrey. Perhaps a little time on the bike this morning. And I'm going to build a fire. While Valerie's making waffles. I'll have mine with lots of syrup. I need the sugar.
4 comments:
One of my teaching buddies, Jess, walked into my room as I was ranting to another teacher, Ed, about a meeting I had been to.
Jess said, "What's going on? Are we angry? I'm in!"
I told him that he won me over forever with that. Also, maybe you'd feel more subversive if you lived in Utah County.
Or maybe you just have to face the reality that its hard to be subversive of the establishment when you have become the establishment.
After all, you are a father, a university professor, a member of church's bishopric, and a team coach. Aren't these all the figures of authority you were subverting when you were young?
Suck it up, man, and deal with it. We're all just kids that stuck around long enough for the next generation to rebel against.
did you read my mind....a broken horse.
I never got around to responding to sd's comment above.
He's right. The point about having become the establishment. I know he's right, but it doesn't feel quite right. I didn't know being the establishment ("just another brick in the wall") would feel quite like this.
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