First One's Free, Kid

The first one's free, kid

"A once fluid man, crammed and distorted by the classical mess." Anon.

Eight days to go. Feel weird. Hard to explain, really. Knowing that I'm this close to stepping off into the void. Tumbling over that edge, falling, dreamlike, in slow motion. Knowing mostly one thing-that I need to end what I am currently doing and transition forward into some other, different thing. The opportunity to walk the Camino is perhaps that thing. It is undeniably a different thing.

The above epithet is purported to be inscribed on the tombstone of legendary martial artist Bruce Lee. It has always captured my interest. The phrase resonates, I imagine, with most humans over the age of forty. Persons old enough, anyway, to have endured, or at least witnessed at close hand, the wearing away of hopes and dreams and the subsequent acceptance of the lot given. People that have come to understand viscerally the sour bile of regret and self-loathing that comes with the meeting of the irresistible force and the unmoveable object--the clash of personal desire for self-actualization and the monolithic, jack booted institution that is modern culture, the 'classical mess,' if you will.

On an important level I feel certain that my choice to focus on the Camino as some sort of a cure all for what ails me is an overly simplistic one. Admittedly. Maybe more symbol than actual. Or maybe it's just a momentum shifter, like a bracingly cold bucket of water to pour over my head in a more or less desperate urge to end the, oh, let's call it a hangover. A hangover caused by the over imbibing of the strong intoxicant that is current consumerist society.

The concoction is one ass kickingly potent brew. The shiny objects that we can't say 'no' to. The cars that we now converse with. The brand name shoes and hundred and eighty dollar sneakers marketed to twelve and fourteen year olds. The video game as electronic crack. Like rats choosing the endorphin rush lever over the food pellet lever. The smart phones that have somehow, in the span of a few short years, have become incomprehensibly indispensable.  

That part is the hook, the draw. The first one's free, kid. And before you know it the little buggers are scrambling like bugs on a sheet of hot metal, hurtling themselves into cyberspace, lemmings pouring over the cliff. The trick, as they grow into fine, upstanding participants in the ponzi scheme that is the capitalist economy, is to find the currency that allows the growing addiction to continue. Ah, and here's the rub. All one needs to do to stay plugged in, to get that next new rush, to join the ranks of the worker drones in their semi-mindless acceptance of their role as econo-slaves helping the globalists in building their pyramids-you know the one of which I speak, it's on our currency.

I gotta tell you, dear reader, swimming against this current of cultural normality, against the party line (and don't think that there is separation on this issue between donkeys and elephants) that spouts adages all day long about productivity, Protestant work ethics, doing your part, being a good citizen--I just can't do it anymore, or at least I need a good break. The Camino is that break.

There are no pretense in me that speaks to this time on the Iberian Peninsula as a fix all that will terminate my own intrinsic anxieties, fears, hang ups.  No, it's more that I have run plum out of tactics for staying afloat in the increasingly toxified pool that our culture is becoming. Can't tread water in an ocean of mercury. Can't keep putting one foot in front of the other when the path beneath your feet is made of decomposing diapers, electronic waste, automotive oil. Can't keep smiling into the faces of the materially addicted zombies around me, pretending that our house is not on fire, that no emergency exists.

Studies consistently draw startling, positive corollaries between high stress and poor health. The lack of control in one's life leads directly to suppressed immune systems and illness. The swimming upstream but always being swept downstream despite it phenomenon of always falling slightly further behind financially each month causes a distress that consumes our well being like cancer. The link between stress and cancer, by the way, is being established.

So, yeah, why I have this urge, like a bird knows it's time to fly south each year, and I've gotta go. Don't truly know why. But the desire to end the incessant, unceasing buzz and jingle of email alerts, texts, calls; the expectation that I'll respond to your message instantly--I want it to stop in the same way that Tom Hanks needed his toothache to stop in the film Castaway. Like his character, I too, at this point, would smash the sharp end of an ice skate into my gums with a cocoanut if I deemed it the only way in which I could make it all stop.

Today I'd like to end my verbal vomitus with Randall Jarrel's well known work 'The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.' The feel of the piece, it's emotional tone, the seemingly immutable meat grinder that is the nation state, that is the weight of convention and expectation--it resonates greatly with my emotional perspective at this time. 

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,

And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.

Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,

I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.

When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

Think of my Camino trip as a parachute.

Whad'd President Bush tell the American public after we commenced our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Did he tell them to contact their congressmen? No. Did he tell the to sign up to serve in the armed forces? Nope. Did he tell them to buckle down, tighten their belts and get ready for deprivations that would aid our cause? No he did not. He told them that extremists could not disrupt our way of life. He told them, and I quote, 'Take your family to Disneyland.'