“I don’t know why I spend my time writing songs I can’t believe.”
Some of us have been living our whole lives trying to be the best character in a story. We build our self assured moral structures and finely-hone our infectious eccentricities, a lifelong preparation for that moment of recognition.
The story will never be written. Every little bit of self-enrichment, every album you listened to over and over till you knew every word, every silly hat you considered buying because you thought one day you could wear it to a party and start a conversation with it, every wager you place against pessimism is for naught. To dream is to convince yourself that you are better than your present lot in life; That you are a failure. That you need to work harder. Sometimes that hard work sweeps you up in a current, the dream quickly disappearing from your sight on the horizon, a distant memory of a time you fell and almost drowned.
Sometimes the hard work does not defeat your dream. But the dream has to be huge. You have to throw away a lot of baggage to be light enough to hang onto something so insubstantial. To come at it with nothing. To pay into it bit by bit like an account in an uninsured bank, leveling up the character in your party who might leave at any minute. To fall in love with a ghost. To write her love letters on your blog, buy things for her to give to her later, investing in a flimsy hope that there will be a later, cuddling a nothingness in your mind as you drift to sleep, convincing yourself that the nothing is something, that ideas are real things that merely lie in the future, that you are paying into a destiny with every hour worked and penny saved and craigslist apartment ad bookmarked, that future you will look back with nostalgic thanks, that the story will mean something, that there is an audience, that there is a God.
But like the fear underlying religion, you try hard to push one thought out of your mind. You fear it is a universal truth: Wanting something harder doesn’t make it more likely to be true. Every hour of your 50-hour work week might merely drift away into the ash of the bonfire of time, obliterated completely, leaving as little a mark on history as the hat you never bought for the party you never went to. Without the fire of that dream, you wouldn’t even have been able to work this hard. I don’t even know if that counts as irony.
Tonight I ate dinner with my family for the first time in months and, as they left, felt a bad headache coming on. It drove me to bed around 9PM. I woke up in the middle of the night–around the time I usually find sleep in the first place–from a nightmare about Logan’s Run. This re-imagining of Logan’s Run was split into three acts. The first act and the last act were familiar, telling the stories of the Carousel-worshiping village, and life after the escape to the upper world, respectively. However, and even though I was familiar with the entirety of the story while in the midst of it, I was stuck in a phantom second act where I/Logan tried in vain to escape the compound. Everyone I knew in the underground city had been evacuated or killed by act one, and I crept along industrial hallways and crevices between metallic structures, cleverly avoiding the paths of maliciously reprogrammed robots. Being alone, my only companion was the everpresent, disembodied voice of whatever force was trying to kill me, as it threatened me over the speakers of the compound. As afraid as I was, I was driven onward because I knew that a glowing, green world awaited me in act three if I could only get there. Finally, cornered by three robots, I remembered my path to escape was to swim! Below me was a pipe, and even though I didn’t think I had enough time before the robots got me, and even though the pipe didn’t seem quite wide enough, I pried off the rubbery lid and dove inside.
I never found out if the pipe had an end, or even if I drowned. I woke up instead.
