Found Writing 2: Confined to the Road Ahead
Another piece of found writing from my hard disk archives, this one from April 2006, a time of money and career and personal stress. I can’t say I still feel this way… in many ways my life is simpler and quieter than it was then. Anyway, there are some nice turns of phrase worth publishing.
The so-called crawl space beneath my ground-level apartment floods with water following each of Berkeley’s frequent rain showers. Other than when said flood douses the pilot light for my weird and scary floor-mounted heater, I don’t really care. Left alone, however, the building’s foundation is at risk of erosion.
The prospect of the building’s collapse concerns my landlord precisely to the extent that it is profitable for him to be concerned. Thus, instead of digging up the ground and installing the proper drainage system, he decides to employ the services of a much less expensive, yet mammoth, water pump. This machine is separated from my bedroom by not more than a few inches of wood and insulation.
“It is loud. It disturbs me,” I tell him. “How surprising! It emits only a ‘low whir’,” he replies. Actually, that “low whir” is a low B-natural hum starting and stopping at roughly hourly intervals, but randomly, like the drones of a Casio-keyboard bagpipe in an audio version of water torture.
It made me realize: what I really want in my life is some peace and quiet. No alarms and no surprises, as someone once sang (but not in the vaguely suicidal way they sang it). I want to sit and read books and then walk somewhere quietly and drink coffee and then go to sleep when my eyelids droop. I am tired of the noise of modernity, the steady beats of war drums and market tickers and engine pistons. Their rhythm chokes me. They are loud. They disturb me.
As free as I am supposed to be (Americans have so much excess freedom that we have even begun to export it), it is often difficult to turn off or shut up or slow down. I am a captive to the cycles of bills and debts and budgets, confined to the road ahead. Beyond the cycles, there are errands to run and papers to sign and meetings to attend. Freedom means having options, but the toughest one to come by is the one to choose less over more.
Nominally, I have this freedom. It’s called being a bum. But I don’t want to be a bum. I want to have means without responsibility.
On the other hand, real freedom is internal. The trick is to not worry about things outside of one’s control. Like god, for instance, or the weather, or shifts in tectonic plates, or the rate of decay of take-out pad thai.
Internal or external, the freedom I crave is to simplify, to quiet, to do or not do as I please, to turn down the volume, to breathe deeply, to sleep. I want freedom from the low whir.
