Independence

Life has a tendency to divide itself up between ages with childhood playing a very important part. Yeah, childhood... that special time when little minds are still growing, learning about the world, exploring innocent ideas about what this grand thing might just be all about. 

When you grow up with someone during that magical age of preteen eternity, you kind of have what might be understood as a shared sacred space. Or something like that. Maybe just innocence...

They hadn’t really talked so much since the time they were kids. There they were, relaxed with time to walk and talk about pretty much everything. Which they more or less did.

“The world’s got a long way to go,” he said.

“You’re telling me,” she replied.

“You think this is better than California?” he asked.

“Down in LA, everything was about The Industry… nobody seemed to be able to talk about anything else.”  She knew he’d been in Japan a while and was probably going to stay. Maybe she thought it was as good as anyplace else.

“People in Japan… can be as strange as they are here. At least when we were kids, it all seemed a lot less complicated. Not like living is really difficult to begin with… there was nothing difficult about living in the ignorance of that more innocent age.”  He didn’t really know where this was headed other than the fact that most people are hard to talk to. She wasn't. 

But the kind of shanty-sounding bluegrass music they were listening to had never been something he liked. There was a hollowness to it that just didn’t connect where it needed to. All fiddle and no stomp. So they were walking along the water.

Then she began to get him up to speed with the world he’d missed. Yeah, the world he'd always missed anyway 'cause he was different. Maybe she thought she'd bring him up to speed to what used to be thought of as ‘the future’ that was happening in a very now time.

“Mom doesn’t have time for that stuff anymore. She’s given up on people, how clueless they can be.”

“How’s that?” He was wondering.

“For example, like the way we don’t celebrate certain holidays. Just at the beginning of this last July, a clerk in the store was trying to make conversation and asked what we had planned for Independence Day.”

He nodded and listened as she continued.

“Mom just walked away. Different generation. As I haven’t given up yet, I stayed and asked him, ‘Excuse me, what does the 4th of July mean to you?’ The eager-to-be sales clerk continued with the usual rhetoric, ‘To celebrate independence and freeduh…’ – that’s when he stopped and I just looked at him. Then he got embarrassed, turned a few different shades of red. I really felt sorry for the guy.” She laughed.

“You see,” she continued, ”they don’t teach people to look at color.”

That afternoon, they talked about a lot of things centered around 'education'. Her daughter can be judged to excel in everything, which is not hard to believe when it is understood that she is home-schooled. No, she's definitely not missing anything by not attending the institutions. 

Living in Japan, 'the system' is religion. A jealous pedagogical religion of repetitive rhetoric designed to prime young minds to embrace the erase of education's hypnotic induction. 

Recently, he's actually been having a hard time sleeping.

There are those nights where the big picture just won't go away.

Waking up must do this to people. He's thinking about what may be his last opportunity to step back into a collective memory he was, by chance, simply been born into. 

If anything, this is one piece of life worth chronicling before the window shuts. But not here. Not right now. 

Now...this is stomp he can listen to.