Of Low Importance

Ever read 'Ode to a Grecian Urn'? I think it's by Keats but
don't quote me on that. It's interesting in that from beginning to
end you're reading about a (granted, corny Romantic era horse
puck stuff it is) scene which is painted on an urn of a young boy
sitting beneath the summer shade of a (i think it's a) weeping
willow, playing his lyre (of course, everyone and their damned
uncle had a lyre back then) and a young lass with pigtails is peeking,
from around the corner, at the young musical lad. And initially
you're thinking 'Yeah, yeah. Pastoral Poetry with the element
of eros. Who really gives a...' but the thinking of the reader shifts
when you give it a second read. Because really what's happening
is that the narrative voice of the poem is the author himself,
Mr. Keats who at that point in his life was dying a dastardly death
due to disease. That's alot of d's in a sentence. But what's interesting
is that the point of the whole poem is not the young laddy or the
young lassie or the lyre or the cotton-pickin willow tree. It's about
Mr. Keats who was basically coughing up blood while writing
this stupid poem wishing only to be in the place of that urn but
as he starts to understand, and stand in the realm of the tangible,
the urn is nothing more than paint and stone. And the truth is 'beauty'
as he puts it and the sad truth of his life is that he's sitting there,
wishing he could be a picture on a fucking vase, rather than being
himself. Because being in a timeless place of beauty and love is
easier than being in the here and now.
And that's the sad reality of all of us when we wish to be someplace
other than where we are. But it's drilled into us, isn't it? Dorothy,
good old Dorothy from Kansas clickin' her frickin' heels together
repeating the sullen phrase over and over and over - 'there's
no place like home...' What kind of a message are we sending to
people with this Midwestern literature that pervades our schools
and trains of thought? Click your heels or maybe just find a
rabbit hole to a parallel universe and you'll be okay?
NO.
That's bullshit. The truth of it is that there ain't no time
machines, there ain't no rabbit holes, there ain't no fucking
matrix. We are stuck. And we trudge our way through this life
in knee deep mud fantasizing about useless escapist bullshit
that does us NO good. There is a good and I'm certainly
convinced there is an evil, too. We all must walk that middle
line at some point and stick to the path, no matter where
it takes us, because the road that lays ahead in each of our
lives is all we truthfully have to journey on.

I don't want to go to work today.

But then again, who gives a fuck what I want. I'm a slave
to the grind, a cog in the wheel of a giant machine that is
advancing more and more in territory each day. I think
we have to do some kind of 'group seminar' today in our
training class and I just KNOW i'm gonna get stuck with
either Ember or Vance, and I'll be biting my tongue purple
the whole time and peeling off underlayers of the desk each
time one of them opens their piping-wide cakeholes that
spout mammoth amounts of shit and bad breath by the
millisecond. Here I go. It's off to work I go. Not because
I want to but because I have to - I'm a number in a system
to these people and nothing else.

Billy Corgan said it well.

I fear that I am ordinary
just like everyone.
To lie here and die among
the sorrows,
Drift among the days.