Monday, October 30, 2006

Hanging playing guitar

posted by justinrigby at 5:20 pm

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I thought just incase you ever read your blog stuff again you should have some of this to read again too... just incase. I read it over and over. This seemed like a nice place to put it for you to discover.

"Escapism, we are led to believe, is evidence of a deficiency in character, a certain failure of temperament, and like so many -isms, it is to be strenuously avoided. How do you expect to get ahead? people ask. But the question altogether misses the point. The escapist doesn't want to get ahead. He [or she or they] simply wants to get away. I understand this, for I am an unapologetic escapist. Once before, I had abandoned the life I knew in Washington, D.C., escaping the urgent din of the continental world for a distant atoll in the equatorial Pacific. I lived there for two years, never once looking at a clock, marveling at what a strange turn my life had taken. I may have heat rash , I thought back then, and I might be hosting eight different kinds of parasites, but at least I am not some office drone. I had escaped, I thought mirthfully as I tended to my septic infections. And then, suddenly, my life too another dramatic U-turn and I once again found myself back in Washington, where every morning I was confronted by a debilitating decision: What tie to wear?
...
Escapism is not without its costs. Life had been desperate in Kiribati. What ever hopes we'd had of finding the South Seas idyll of our imagination were cruelly dashed by the realities of island living. True it had been beautiful. But it had also been hard living. Living in a state of perpetual denial, as we did in Kiribati, had a way of heightening one's appreciation of small things, like chocolate. But strangely, I didn't appreciate chocolate anymore. Indeed, I couldn't remember the last time I'd even had chocolate, and for some reason, this had begun to bother me, for what is life, a good life, but the accumulation of small pleasures?
...
One morning, I recalled, I had awoken to find a dead pig in our backyard. This was no small problem on the equator. There is nothing like the odor of dead swine decomposing under the tropical sun to help one decide what the day's priorities are going to be. It took the better part of the morning to dispose of the bloated beast. I found a large stick and I pushed and prodded the pig toward the incoming tide. Please, ocean, I said, just take the pig. But it wouldn't. The pig floated, and each time I pushed it out into the water, the ocean pushed it right back to me, depositing the carcass with a grotesque thud at my feet. This greatly amused the I-Kiribati onlookers, until finally one man took pity. We each took a hoof in hand and pulled the rotting pig about three hundred yards through the surf toward reef's edge, where with a mighty heave we tossed it into the white water. "A present for the sharks," my companion had said. That's when I noticed that my hands, my arms, and much of my torso were stained with dead-pig slime. I don't think I have ever swum faster.

Now why, one may reasonably ask, would anyone want to go back to such a world? This is an excellent question. Boredom, a ferocious, unyielding boredom certainly played a part. That morning in Kiribati, I had managed, in a few short hours, to do something productive. I had disposed of a problem. I had swum in the Pacific Ocean. I had sensed danger. I had made a friend. I had a new story to tell. Certainly I would not want to relive that particular day, but at least something had happened. Something interesting. While it may be true that finding a decomposing pig in your yard is not an ideal way to begin one's day, I found that beginning each new day in Washington, as I did, with the shocking blast of an alarm clock buzzer, shortly to be followed by a frantic race to the office, where I would be greeted by a computer with the news that I had ninety-two new messages, of which thirty-seven were alleged to be urgent, and then to spend the remainder of the day stressing mightily about agendas and bullet points, memos and PowerPoint presentations, conferences and conference calls, only to call it quits long after sunset with the queasy realization that after all that time, all that energy, all that fussing, I really had nothing to show for my day, nothing real and tangible and good, well, I found that such a day stinks too.

In Washington, we were led to believe that we inhabited the centre of the world, that the rest of the globe spun according to our whims and priorities. This can be a heady feeling. Should the Namibians have electricity? We decide. Should the Laotians be able to trade sugarcane? If they would just ask nicely. Is the Haitian government getting uppity? Fuck'em. We're taking them out. This tends to attract a certain kind of person, and when I looked at myself in the mirror and noticed my gray suit, my Brooks Brothers shirt, my silk tie, and my soft leather Italian shoes, I realised that I was not such a person. I felt like a tourist, dreamily walking through a life that was not meant to be mine. Some people are attracted to power. I'd rather be plucking at a ukulele on a faraway beach. I was not a soft-leather-Italian-shoe kind of man. I was a flip-flop man. And as a flip-flop man I knew what needed to be done. Kiribati may not have been paradise, bit I was ready to keep looking..."

- Troost 2006

7:45 am  

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