35 Years Fixed: An essay on failure, strife, and audacity

35 Years Fixed: An essay on failure, strife, and audacity


35 years fixed: An essay on failure, strife, and audacity
I have been fired from my job. My academic pursuits to this point have been failures. Life at this juncture has been speeding in a 59” Edsel trying to catch up with my cohorts. Rejection is inevitable, but I keep racing for something I can’t understand and at times I snub. My breathing is relaxed and shallow and the race is a marathon. I won’t cross the line. Winning is not in my personal paradigm. It is not that I don’t drive to win, but winning is like the first taste of blood for a newborn carnivore. Once achieved it becomes adrenalin, an opiate overcoming everything with intimacy. This taste is unfamiliar. I have not sipped from this glass. Don’t kid yourself, however, I am drunk but without intimacy. A callused tree in the cold of winter, I am still and alive.

The economy has downsized and my share of the pie has been taken from me in the night. This undoubtedly compounds my disposition. A virus spreads via contact and I have been touched by something uninvited. While the vaccine is available, I am scared. I am terrified. Frozen in spite of movement, I can’t push myself free. Tied up in a wicked intersection of the past, future, and present, I cry and rant, and squirm and piss. Nothing changes. Negative attraction swings the pendulum inverse to reality and counter to what is accepted. It is here where I rest and here where I interact with comfort, with solace.

Goodbye is profound, but separation is suicide. I struggle with severance and pursue deference. Obsequiousness is the mark and I will surely fall short. The marriage of sane and insane cannot divorce. This is optimism. This is something I can mold, play, and build. Like a child looking to the stars, I can relax my brain in numbing intellectualism. The clouds have broken and I must awake with an understanding that the race, the victory is illusionary. It is not real. It is dead. The awakening is the deep sleep on a Saturday morning. The geometric fit is only what it isn’t and our conditioning is wrong. The problem is mathematical but the answer is neurological and the path is spiritual. My perspective, synonymous with my world, drives for change and I now understand that it is close. I can hear the beating heart, the sniffling nose. It is close.

With this break, I can breathe. With this break, more is broken but it does not belong to me. It is foreign and unknown begging me to feel nothing. Altruism can only exist with apathy. The relationship cannot be broken, but it can be seen differently. A needle has been placed in my consciousness and what is removed is nothing, but what is injected is an anesthetic. Starvation will pursue fruition in the desert of my brain. I am free. Free from fixation, free from time. Glowing lights and fluid clowns dancing, singing, and rejoicing. The child is free from maturation and free from blame. Free to flourish. The race is no longer about victory. It is without consequence. Once again I return to severance and perpetuate forgiveness. I forgive. I forgive. I forgive. Those words are painful and scorn my being with confirmation of the past. To confirm is to recognize and to recognize is to charge the engine into overdrive. The race is won. It was always won. There is no appropriate metaphor but to suggest that at 35 I will rest is false. I will perceiver. I am awake. 35 years fixed to the past will be reborn.