Deep Thoughts

So it is Sunday night and a rare rainy day in LA. I haven't written a blog in a while and I don't really feel like playing catchup on everything that has been going on in my life, suffice it to say, it is a lot, like usual. I am writing tonight because I am having thoughts and feelings that I haven't had in a while. I used to feel like this a lot in high school, introspective, thinking and contemplating life and what it meant to be alive and who and what I wanted to be as I got older.

I think, as time has gone by and I've gotten older I get so caught up in just getting by each day that I forget about the larger stuff a lot of the time. I watched a documentary called "Magic Trip" with Stefan today about Ken Kesey and the merry pranksters and their trip to the Worlds Fair. There is something about the pure creation, freedom, exploration that is really moving to me.

In the movie, Kesey explains One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and about how the bad guy of the movie isn't the nurse, that she is part of the institution and that it is the institution that is the bad guy, that the movie is really about the struggle of man and the machine, McMurphy loses because he fights the institution, the Chief wins by breaking free.

That is what the pranksters do in the movie, they don't struggle fighting against the ideas they are abjectly against, they instead pave their own path, exploring and creating everywhere along the way. They are truly free in every respect. It is interesting to see how different America was only half a century ago. They are sitting on top of a bus, driving down the highway and when a cop pulls them over they all jump out of the bus and start recording him with cameras. I can't imagine how many cops would be called, how many people would be tazed, how many thousands of dollars of fines would be thrust upon them. Of course, in another sense, the civil rights movement was just picking up steam at this time and there was still segregation in the South.

I sometimes wonder if there still even is a fight between man and machine. I don't think so. I think man and machine have merged. Man has become part of the machine and it is almost impossible to break out of it. I think about that with Apple, like the time before computers and digital technology as Eden, and we tasted the forbidden fruit and Eden was lost. It is no mistake that Apple's logo is an apple with a bite out of it. Some people have thought about technology and machines in that way for a long time, as something that is meant to liberate man, not enslave him. I go back and forth about how I feel about it.

I have wanted nothing more for most of my life than to escape from being part of that machine and now I am struggling to find a place in it, or figuring out whether I want a place in it at all. The Fleet Foxes lyric is "I was raised up believing, I was somehow unique, like a snowflake, distinct among snowflakes, unique in each way you can see. And now after some thinking, I think I'd rather be, a functioning cog, in some great machinery, serving something beyond me."

Serving something beyond you is important. Here is the thing I am struggling with, my aunt had me read this book about mental illness and will power and in it, the author goes to great lengths to describe how people with mental illness have this aspiration for their life to be great, constantly romanticizing and intellectualizing, they are never okay with being average, having a normal job, raising a family, having a significant other and going through each day, like most everyone else does.

So which side should I fall on? When is it time to give up the dreams that I have and take whatever comes along?

It's an interesting question and not something I've figured out yet. Living a normal life would be a lot easier for me if I found success in the career path I am aiming for. I've been doing a ton of imrpov and I'm putting together a standup set and making sure I'm prepared with an original pilot and will start writing a spec script soon, so I'm prepared if this internship I'm at turns into a writer's assistant job.

Anyway, getting very tired. Everything looked really pretty tonight driving home as the rain clouds cleared out and the ocean shook around violently. More later. Sleep now.