My sweet jellybean.

It's exactly 3 am. Something about writing on a computer in the dark. You feel isolated. Separate from the world. But not in a bad way entirely. Like a lone coyote, got the moon to himself.

My life doesn't change much. Nothing too fast. And I feel stuck. Most people probably do. The mother, trapped. The man in his marriage, trapped. The banker checking spreadsheets, trapped. The impudent adolescent in his parent's suburban home, trapped. Probably most people you meet feel trapped. In their life, in their bodies, in their god, in their relationships. Whatever. We've all got invisible bear traps cutting at our feet.

I'm suffering from projection. There's probably a few lucky bastards who don't feel trapped. I haven't met them. I don't know their secret. Go find someone who earnestly tells you he doesn't feel trapped and ask him why not?

I've been pruning and pruning at my life like a dying, spotted plant. It's no good. Changes are small and insignificant. I want to repot my life.

But people don't change all of a sudden. Not many people can make cataclysmic changes. That's why diets fail. That's why 90% of people who join gyms go less than three times. The bird loves his cage because he knows it.

When zoos first get wild elephants they tie them up with big chains and the elephants will rattle and rattle and pull and yank themselves into a big heaving wrinkled mass of exhaustion. In not much time ropes replace the chains. Then smaller ropes. Then no rope. An elephant uprising would be a small thing to do and an apocalyptic thing to happen but it doesn't happen. Bird and his cage.

Most of us feel trapped. Probably. I haven't asked everybody. But few do much about it. Have you ever seen Fight Club? The principal character is trapped. His first solution is to become a tourist at support groups. You know. He goes to meetings and pretends to have testicular cancer so that he can feel loved and so that he can be honest. This works to a degree for a while and then inevitably fails. Perhaps because of it's basic irony: he lies in order to be honest.

Then he adapts a new personality and becomes stark raving mad but before he does he unleashes a natural self. An eating, fighting, fucking barbaric self but it's honest. Except for his self-imposed schizophrenia, anyway, it's honest. His first step: he blows up his apartment. Erases his things.

Don't worry. I'm not going to do that. But there's something attractive about it. Starting over. Clean slate. Delete and start over. There's a reason it fails. We, none of us, get to start over. But it's still attractive. If I woke up with amnesia tomorrow, I wonder what the first thing I would do would be? If the whole world woke up with amnesia what would the world do? Maybe we'd forget a lot of the bad stuff. But we'd have to make up new bad stuff. Because we need it.

I heard a comedian say recently that we're all at where we're at for a reason. It was part of a joke no doubt but I missed the joke. That was the most depressing thing I've heard in a long time. Maybe I'm not a steaming electric ball of potential waiting to be kinetic. Maybe this is it. Maybe this is all my kinetic possibility right now. I thought about that for more than a week.

It's probably true. But it's not universally true. Murder victims are not at where there at for a reason. Starving children are not at where there at for a reason. Of course, more philosophically they are. Maybe not the individual him or herself, not personally responsible. But I think that's more than the comic meant to say.

So what's my reason? Why am I at where I'm at? It's more than the bird and his cage.

And if I don't want to be at where I'm at, where do I want to be at and how do I get there? And why am I not there?

Really. I'm not going to blow up my apartment. Don't worry. But how does one begin a cataclysm? Or maybe that's my problem. I've never learned how to be a small step person.

SS