Oct 13, 2006

As I was heading towards Landis Green on the FSU campus today, I saw a maintenance man using a piece of machinery to clean the Gilchrist dorm wall. Sitting over by the sidewalk, by itself, was a gas can. It was very red against the green grass. Its blue-rag-stuffed nozzle pointed engagingly towards passers-by, like a dog poking its nose through a fence. In the movies, whenever you spy a gas can, you can be sure that Something Will Burn. Or else why show the fuel? As I walked on, I pictured the obvious—myself taking the container, shaking gas all over something, and setting it on fire. I had no real will to do this, only impersonal curiosity. And my mind just as predictably recoiled, negating the thought with a tired reflex.

The bored automation of my response startled me. In my life, have I ever done anything truly destructive? I think of myself not only as terribly experienced, but also plenty open-minded. But I suddenly perceived an experience that not only have I never really engaged in , but from which I actively shrank. Destruction bad, preservation good. Why? I saw my desire to preserve everything for the numbing superstition that it was, just another sad compulsive leftover of my New Age upbringing. There are some unhealthy people in that spirituality, people that frantically fear the dark, who try to rid themselves and their lives of all traces of it—as if that were possible. I don’t think I’ve ever feared the darkness, I’ve only feared the fact that I didn’t fear it. I feared what it meant about me. And I’ve overcompensated.

I’ve always had an active conscience. If I see a bug in my house, I kill it—but I feel bad. I hate crumpling paper and throwing it away; I want to recycle it. I’ve even gone back into a store to retrieve a band-aid that fell off, so nobody would see it on the floor and want to puke. I’m well aware of how absurd that is. But I guess I’ve not let myself realize yet what a fucking prison I’m in, to be so inhibited from making a negative impact on the world. And I understand that’s how people felt after the PC ’90′s, which is why Bush got such a following—government-sanctioned destructiveness, both political and social, probably felt liberating for a while. Kill life, waste resources, disgust people. Doing so, thoughtlessly, would render me into the kind of person I most hate. But if I hate them for their disrespect of life, and then choke my life off trying not to be like them, what have I accomplished?

But you see, I didn’t snatch the gas can up, pour it over Landis Green, and dance around the bonfire like a “Fight Club” fanatic. I went home and wrote a blog entry about my thoughts. Maybe it’s enough that I saw something a little differently. I was conscious enough to catch my thinking and change it, open up to a new idea. But what if that isn’t enough? Do I strike the lighter next time?

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