I want I want I want

I want to be a writer, paid to lay my mind out with a sea of words that make you put the book to one side, and think about what was just said, relating it to your own inner most thoughts in the same way that Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg have done for me. Like Keats, I want my “name writ in water”.

I want to be a Photographer who’s photos make you realise that a split second in time, the essence of a moment forever passed has been captured forever, for the World to see.

I want to be a Philosopher trying to make sense of the World, abandoning all of my untrustworthy, lugubrious pre-conceptions about life and reforming them on my own, with nothing taught by anyone else, like a modern day Descartes.

I want to be a Politican, dedicated to helping those less fortunate, the down and outs, the people who do not succumb to the fetish for money, the ones who want to live but feel abandoned by a flawed system. The ones who need that little bit of support, who do not have it in them to be bank managers, but are still people.

I want to be a journalist, bringing the World into the small homes of a hungry-for-news British public. A decent journalist, not the type who will destroy lives just to bag a story on Britney Spears and earn a fortune in the process.

I want to be a charity worker in Africa, who notices that it isn’t just a case of “teaching a man to fish and he’ll learn to feed his family over time”, that these people need direct help now. Who, even if he helps one person live a better life, knows it’s worth it, much more so than slaving in an office in Leicester every day for no good reason.

I want to be a musician, who’s songs inspire a generation. A Dylan of the new fast World, who creates a legacy, whose canvas is silence to be painted on by sound.

I want to be a Premiership footballer, who fights to bring Leicester back into the Premiership and has Chelsea, Arsenal and Manchester United, not to mention Barcelona and Real Madrid all fighting to buy me.

I want everything and nothing. I want to be free to live a different life every so often, never getting too comfortable for too long. I want to go from girl to girl, and never get bored, until I find that one person who keeps the excitement alive and tames me. I want the poetic life that lies dormant within everyone, ready to explode like a star that cannot possibly hold itself in the same place a second longer. I want to find my sense of spirit and make peace with it, after chasing it for so long.

The Kerouac Effect

“I like too many things and get all confused and hung up running from one falling star to another until I drop. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.”

There are relatively few books that i’ve consumed over the past few years that have stuck out as having an incredibly enlightening affect on me. No book that I can immediately bring to mind, has had such a deep affect on the way I think and what I want out of life, than Jack Kerouac’s masterpiece “On The Road”.

If you’d have asked me, when I was 15 if a book could ever have a profound affect on my way of thinking, i’d have told you to “fuck off, books are for gays”. It’s striking just how much i’ve changed the way I think over the past six or seven years.
 

Bob Dylan once wrote of “On The Road” ….
“It changed my life like it changed everybody else’s”…
There are those who do not understand the hype of the book. They cannot understand where lies the originality, or the excitement, or the coherence in the story. There is certainly a lack of coherence. It’s all over the place. At times, it makes no sense, it seems confused.

And right there lies it’s brilliance.

The speed in which the story moves, the pace of the thought process and the confusion that went into this novel, the unpredictable nature of the style of writing links beautifully to the unpredictability of the characters lives, and knowing it’s based on Kerouac’s own life, is even more reason to fall madly in love with this book.

I constantly find myself picking out extracts from the book that I relate to enormously. There is no doubt a World of difference between what I want out of life and what Kerouac wanted out of life. But within the differences, come such strong similarities that I cannot help but be influenced, relating my own life back to the Kerouac’s self modelled character of “Sal”.

I do not know what I want from my life. I grow ever more confused every day. So confused. I cannot stick to one thing for more than a couple of months. I like too many things. I always need change, I almost crave change. I feel pressured into being a certain way, living a life I do not want. I want to live. I want to get out and meet people who I might never see again, people who have more to offer than just talking about work, or how best to “maximise profits”, I want to meet people who make me think they are fucking weird but turn out to be memorable in every way, I want to see new things I never planned to see, I want the unpredictable life and yet paradoxically, I want peace. “I have nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion”. And reading Kerouac is like reading how I want to be, how I feel inside, written down in a story. Knowing that it isn’t just me who has ever felt like I feel, is indefinably comforting.

If you have never read Kerouac before, I strongly suggest you do. Though, I cannot promise you’ll take anything out of the book in the way that I have.

“I shambled after them as i’ve been doing my whole life, after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, the ones who are desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn burn burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centrelight pop and everybody goes ‘awwwww’.”

What if…

I run the risk of becoming a little lost soul, worn out and demoralised, tortured by the damning need to make something of myself and my conflicting pleasure found in the unknown and unexplored . I hate the disatisfaction I feel toward life, have always felt toward life, and the apparent “freedoms” that do nothing but restrict individuality, forcing us all to get down on our hands and knees and pray to the great dollar bill. And yet, my love for the “different”, my chase for the ideal freedom, a paradox of wanting chaos, the unknown, the excitement, and at the same time wanting peace and tranquillity remains burnt on the front of my mind like a star that seems imprinted on the night sky.

The damning need to make something of myself.

What if I don’t want to make something of myself?
What if I don’t want a successful career?
What if I don’t want to ruthlessly slay everyone around me, in order to own a car that says “hi, i’m an extension of Jamie’s penis”.
What if I don’t want to be drowning in a sea of worry, every day, reading the same bank letters month in month out telling me i’m late on a payment.
What if I don’t want to spend my life lethargically tapping away at a computer keyboard in an office full of fake phone voices and middle class non-individuals?

What if I chose not to succumb to any worthless religious beliefs, constantly influencing my life, teaching me to ignore reality, teaching my to be unquestioning, full of hate for those who are slightly different, yet at the same time, preaching “God’s love”, purely because i’m scared of death? What if i’m not that gullible?

What if I chose not to take the same fruitless route taken often, by those who then come to me when i’m unhappy with a simple “hey, that’s life”. That’s not my life.

What if I want to go from simple job to simple job, place to place, life to life, a Dean Moriarty figure on an endless search for serenity? Surely serenity in ones life, a peaceful existence, a lasting tranquillity, or on a simpler level; the desire and search for that peace and serenity, free from the fetish of success is a much greater desire, one that can be looked back at in years to come as the ultimate achievement, than one that achieves nothing but more money hand in hand with more stress?

What if I don’t want to settle down, in a nice house, the same as every other middle class worthless, lifeless soul on the planet, watching the same crap TV, talking about the same things in life, arguing with each other about debts and cutting down.

What if, instead of that stereotypical home made lifestyle, that sees an oddly acquiescing public buy into constantly, I chose to live in different places? old uncared for, lugubriously forgotten flats overlooking more of the same, a forest of the forgotten, that just exist for me to sleep in for a few months before moving on to the next equally forgotten flat over a far away horizon seeped in the unknown?

What if I don’t want to dedicate my life to one person. What if I want the opposite? Sexually promiscuous encounters? Licentious in nature, with every female that shows the slight bit of interest. With every female that catches your eye, on a bus, or a train station platform, and you share that glimpse of a smile, that moment of salacious lust, that’s forever lost when you finally go your separate ways What if I want that?

What if my life isn’t about work that I dislike so much, but stick to just to be able to afford a week in Spain once a year?

What if I want to kill off the part of my mind that tells me I must take the regular career route, make money, buy a house, holiday once a year, have a family. And instead chose to satisfy my desire for Culture, my incessant excitement for “what life could be”?

What if I have no sense of work commitment or morale? Nor do I want that sense of work commitment and morale, because I fear it will fester in my mind, eating away at my very sense of the uniqueness surrounding every single human being, suddenly becoming nothing but a part of the machinery, making money for other people, dispensable, a cog, nameless, faceless, voiceless.

What if I want to cover my arms in tattoos or my face in tattoos, just to show the moronic bosses of hotel bars, that it isn’t “unprofessional” to have them on show.

What if I want to go to sleep at night, excited about the day ahead, like a child on Christmas eve unable to sleep with puerile anticipation. Heart beating faster at the prospect of the dark of night turning into the light of morning, unsure of what is to come, rather than going to sleep at night, setting the alarm for 7am, and meticulously setting the same old work suit out, making sure there is no sign of a crease, for another lifeless day at work?

What if I I don’t want to “live to work”? What if I want to spend my days as a child trapped in a man’s body, forever kicking a football on the field, accidentally hitting Mrs Camberwell’s fence and incurring the wrath of her old, overweight husband trying to chase me to the end of the street but running out of breath within three footsteps?

What if I want to sneak out of the house at night, to drink beer or smoke weed on the park, like my fifteen year old inner self is begging for a return to, the intense thrill born out of the breaking down the wall of what is conventional and acceptable. Not hurting anyone in the process. Why should I succumb to the calls to “grow up”. Why is the adult World morally superior to the World of the inner child? Did the child create the atomic bomb? Did the child go to war for no reason, leaving thousands of families torn apart? Was the child the greed filled imbecile who created the biggest economic disaster in eighty years? Has the child sat back and watched the disgusting nature of Poverty strangle the very concept of a civilised World? No, that was the adult. What if I don’t want to succumb to a flawed adulthood, riddled with hardship and disappointment? Why would I do that to myself?

In a World ever more obsessed with working hard, succeeding, earning more, spending more, a World that dismisses those less fortunate, or those who wish to take an alternate path, as worthless, the “what ifs” we all must have, are slowly becoming less important, and all that exists in the fraudulent man-made realms of self importance, is that great damning need to make something of myself.