Every time I read a Kurt Vonnegut book, I finish the book and put it down slowly like I have just awakened from a torrent of weird dreams. I just finished reading "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" and suddenly am looking back at these last few years from a new perspective. Only god knows how long that will last before I go back to my turmoil of problems in my little confined box. But for now, while the feeling still lingers, I thought it best to write it out.
For those of you not familiar with the story, I'll break down the main point I am about to write about. But by doing so, I'll be mutilating the excellent work of art, so if you're interested, I suggest reading the book itself. Anyways, Mr. Rosewater is a rich man who basically decides to give up on his riches and move to a poor town with poor people and love them unconditionally. Then he goes completely insane (as if he wasn't already before) because of it. Sort of.
After contemplating the book for a bit, I related it to my own life. My own history of "sacrificing" my youthful years to about 5 or 6 years of devoting almost all of my being toward loving and helping homeless people in any way I could. Of course I served at soup lines on occasion, and volunteered at homeless shelter thrift stores, and even started a nonprofit organization to help give homeless people a voice in Nevada. But, in actuality, the main thing I was doing, and the main thing I was convinced people needed, was loving them. For god's sake, at the age of 17, not only was I convinced I wanted to devote my life to helping homeless people, but I was also convinced I wanted to specialize my devotion to the "lowest of the low" as some people might say. The chronically homeless drunks, drug addicts, and criminals. The whores, the rapists, the wife beaters, the murderers... I never looked down on anyone. I loved them all equally, and was naively convinced that my love could motivate them to change their ways.
Needless to say, by the time I left Las Vegas, all my naive dreams had been shattered to pieces. And, like Mr. Rosewater, I went bat crazy. Or perhaps, everyone else is bat crazy, and I started the process of becoming sane and searching for other rare sane folk out in the world. I left Las Vegas with one question in mind, "What are human beings
for?!"
I thought perhaps I could find the answer in the fine folk of Portland, Oregon. Maybe Tillamook? How about Washington? Ok, fuck it, Spain? France? Germany? Greece? Italy? Belgium? TEXAS!? Gainesville. Democrats? Republicans? Anarchists? Artists? Lesbians?
Came to Gainesville and jumped right back into my homeless endeavors, thinking my burn out had possibly been cured by six months of travel. NOPE! Quit. Burned bridges. Again. Now I am a servant in a deli making sandwiches and smoothies for rich assholes.
Four broken hearts already. All mine of course. It's amazing how often my heart can break and yet still keep beating.
And it seems that all along this journey, I have been practically begging, hoping, for some bout of peace and tranquility like that a good, fancy mental asylum might provide. Just some REST from all this madness in the world. But looking back, although a rest is definitely not what I got, I feel like I have been a long term patient in a mental asylum from the day I left Las Vegas, if not a few months before. All this traveling, all this searching... sometimes I open my eyes and look around and ask myself, "How the hell did I get here? FLORIDA?! WTF?!"
And at times like these, whether they be when I selectively choose when to open my eyes, or they are forced open unconsciously through reading a Kurt Vonnegut book, I realize that these last two years (ok a bit less than that, but close) have been very closely akin to a very long vacation or a long term stay in a loonie bin. Now, what exactly do I do with that knowledge, aside from plan on moving back to Vegas when my lease here is up? THAT my friends, is the question.
"Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before... He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way." ~ Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle
