Dropping the Ball

Dropping out of college had seemed logical at the time.

The cult of my youth lost a game of "20 Questions." My parents' city mouse/country mouse marriage failed, so true love was a fairy tale.

My milk-toast middle class upbringing taught me many life lessons: Owning nice stuff did not make you a nice person. Money could buy happiness but just as often didn't. Modern “civilization” was a thin fabricated veneer over animal humanity. The “education system” taught submission.

Sometimes people worked hard and stayed poor. Most talked themselves into liking whatever they ended up doing with life. Poor, middle class, either way you had to make your own fun like the rest of the world.

All school felt like prison to me. A desk job and a mortgage sounded like signing up for treadmill death before life had even begun. Was that all that humans were good for?

So with nothing but the ground beneath my feet, I walked away from my comfortable life, to discover what, if anything, was important. And I began working.

I didn’t mind hard labor, it was like getting paid to “work out.” Love, or the instinct to breed, seemed important; I fathered four sons and worked endlessly to keep the tribe solvent. They thrived, thanks to nepotism; my second father-in-law was shop foreman at a cement mine, where I found a niche.

Thirty years labor now and my body breaking down. Seduced by the system, I have worked too many hours for the same fake betterment I’d abandoned years ago. Like a washed-up athlete, I struggle on, and still wonder sometimes: for what?

I've found nothing of any real worth besides my little family, so I work to further my wife’s contentment, and my sons’ success, whatever that means. Enlightened self-interest: their joy brings me joy somehow.

There is no master plan, no final destination. My road is mine alone. I don't know nor care what motivates others, it doesn't matter. One generation begets the next; this is mankind’s only immortality.

I have tried to convince my sons that higher education might keep them from working themselves to death. Best to fight the beast from the inside--in comfort. (More animal thinking, preferring maximum survival margins.) Unsurprisingly they also found academia too confining and regimented, and dropped out one by one. They wanted simply to live life, no matter how “poor.” To be happy with music, conversation, food, the outdoors, love making and/or sex, games, dancing, friendly voices, and general revelry. The stuff you can’t always buy and sell.

I mourned their stubborn insistence on going their own way, their future joint pain and heart ache. But the culture of owning crap is diseased. Their rejection of it is a triumph, they are already successful.

A revolutionary act: to exit the rotting structure and step into the open air, to seek authentic life and simple joy. The young man who had done the same 30 years ago decided to be proud of them, no matter how rough the roads they picked.