Status Detour

As if I was unaware of it before, I don’t belong. Pardon me if it is offensive or strange that I begin most everything I write with something about myself. My subjective experience is all that I have to explain the way I see life, it’s such an important thing to me because it’s my story. I suppose that is what made me start thinking as I stood on the jet way, about all the stories around me. Or, why I sat in my seat on the plane feeling both invisible and unique simultaneously, as I observed the other people. As I fell in love with The Beat Reader, I constructed, rather deconstructed,  what I would write here. Bear with me as I let the picture I have in my mind struggle to find its form through words.

What is a person?

Not a human, no I don’t need to know the elements that make man man.

But what is a person?

 I of course sit here upon this plane, the only person wearing  color, and  blazing red at that, interrupting the gray and black mass around me, thinking that a person is not their job, that a person is their dreams. A person is made of their aspirations. A person is…  I imagine peeling back the receding hairlines and wire rimmed glasses, knocking Blackberries from passengers hands, de-threading the Gucci jackets, and throwing Armani pumps out the window, to find the pictures of his childhood, the princess play from her earlier times. But, who says that I am right? Am I wrong? I presuppose that this business class and premier executive flight is full of people who have forgotten how to be persons and have succumbed to the identity of a salary and a suit. I could be wrong. I mean, I really could… right? I overhear their conversations and I don’t think that I am. I wonder when we started caring about things that have no tangible frame of reference in the world.

[what is the real world?... too philosophical.. I refrain for your sake.]

But to be honest I find myself ripping apart the world we have created these days, wondering where it all began? Perhaps I have without realizing it placed myself at the top of a hierarchy, of an anti-society that I don’t belong at the top of, that has no reason to exist.  Maybe it’s simply my rebellion against the man who tells me he is worth more because his bank account has more than $30 in it… because I don’t think that’s what makes me valuable. Am I wrong? Is it true that it only matters that I am aware of the condition of the stock market and the deal that Geico struck that fell through? Does that mean that the knowledge I have that someone else does not have makes me more valuable?

I wish to take it all apart

To begin again looking through a new frame

All the ideas that clutter my mind fall like dust

Dust that you can see in the window on a sunny afternoon

And I want to understand what it is that makes ideas sparkle

Like a child reaching for the particles

Sinking into a faded floral sofa

But why is this child so frail?

For lack of ideas and knowledge?

Are they worth so much less than the counterparts of their parents

Without the ability or opportunity

Or want

To receive a degree from Harvard or Yale?

Perhaps there is something to the subjective reality of individuals

But I cannot help but think we really are still entwined

I cannot be left to think that my own story stands alone

It cannot

It does not

so where do I begin?

Where does the essence of a person begin?

Creation