response to tim's letter...

we wander the same streets friend, staring at all the people, placing them in the categories we can name for how they dress, how they hold their heads or hands. we try to find ourselves out there in amongst that throng of people. pretty girls in pretty dresses, tan legs unfolding on park benches. sunshine littered all over everything. even the dirty, stupid, stoned old men who ask for a slice of pizza or a dime...and yet, we can’t find ourselves there. the men that we are, are not. because we haven’t put ourselves on those same streets; we keep these men chained up in our heads with shackles of words and notions of “self”. the man in the suit very well could be, is, you. as is the boy who was flung out to the world and scattered over its face chasing an illusory man.
your third eye knows this; knows that the looking must be done the other way around. there’s nothing to be stolen, only a sense of being the victim of a theft. maybe because money says so. maybe because those girls rarely meet your gaze with theirs, and when they do...they’re crazy right. yet behind your eyes are your true eyes, look back in and then back out and what really matters becomes more evident.
there is great temptation to blame this lackluster slothful society for our own distressful ennui. there is the temptation to blame the “man” for asking too much. but we have to know, have to take away a different ease and take responsibility for our vision. existential crises too often get bullhorned, shouted to everyone else (who surely doesn’t want to, cannot hear them). hold your anxiety closer, hold your abhorrence for the men with pockets full of cash closer. “everything’s amazing, and nobody’s happy.” -CK Louis. want to be the exception? you’re halfway there. put down these amazing devices, pick up a book–or don’t–and begin to see yourself being the man you always wanted to be. because you are, and you don’t owe anyone a fucking thing for it.

as for what keeps us off the streets and able to take girls back home and get in those dresses: that is called the seat of our pants. fly by it. we’ve got healthier senses of entitlement and healthier doses of middle-class luck. it is not written in our futures that we should actually have to live without a roof over our heads. like the grifters in the movie “the sting”, we’re smarter and know the game too well to let it play us. always, just by a thread, managing to hang on. one damn dollar, one damn day at a time, but always singing loudly in our heads. -t