What is it About Big Cities?

What is it about cities? What is it that immediately brings us to a survival mindset? What is it that inspires us?

I am talking to those who have been fighting for their lives and made it to the other side. I am talking to those who worked so hard to get to where they are and realize they worked themselves into a machine that doesn’t work. The people that fight for change and want to be inspired by what they do but all of a sudden make it to that point of ease. Are you bored? Are you not inspired anymore? Are you in a comfortable position you don’t want to lose because you know what it’s like to not have the things you do but still thrive on being a person who makes a difference? Do we only care to make a difference because of the boost it gives our ego to say we’ve done so?

There are so many questions I have.

I don’t want to be a person who has made it to a place of convenience and settles on the world being as it is because it seems like the higher we grow into this obscene world the more we realize shit really is run by a bunch of idiots with a god complex and expectation of what the world owes them and only them. I don’t want to be the person who stops trying because it feels as though nothing I do ever makes a difference. I don’t want to be a person who just gives up and settles on the life I have finally come into. But I am going to be honest, it is pretty tempting. It’s tempting to want to just dissapear and allow the softness to take over in this priviledged life I have now been given.

But I can’t.

I have become such a recluse over the past couple of years I forget what it’s like to interact with strangers. I am talking about the wonderful strangers we meet randomly in a night out at the bar. The people who aren’t given the time of day because of their status as a service industry worker. You know, the brilliant people that give us life and take care of us. The people physically laboring to exist in this world just to get by whose thoughts and opinions are rarely looked at as valid because of their status.

I miss being a bartender. I miss being a server. I miss surpising the idiots of this world with my mind. I miss being judged like I knew nothing because it helped weed out the bullshit people from the not. The way people treat the service industry will tell you everything you need to know about a person.

I am in Chicago right now for a work trip and tonight I took myself out to dinner. I had two espresso martinis and a mezcal, you know because what else do people drink these days. I talked to strangers. I connected. Like a drug. I get so high off meeting strangers yet in my day to day life I have become this recluse afraid to experience the world anymore. But when I am in a city, I come alive.

I left the restaurant and decided to walk back to the hotel. I stopped at a convenience store, bought a bottle of wine and a pack of cigarettes. I wanted the nostalgia of my past. Of my grind. Of my survival that brought me to become who I am today. And you know, all I can think about is how I can fuck up this next level of life. How can I change the rules at this level? How can I do what I did at my last level that allowed for me to challenge the norm and mess it all up? How can I shake the world?

I used to come from a woe is me place of mind. I didn’t know how to accept my power. I have always known who I am but I didn’t think it was socially acceptable to just come right out and be like “Sup, bitches. I’m here to mess shit up.” But ya know what? I don’t give a fuck anymore. I am here to fuck shit up. And I am not going to apologize for it anymore. I know most people who know me look at me and probably think meek? But to who I am, the person I know I am, I do not always function at my full potential because I am scared. Because the person and level I already function at scares and intimidates people. I am telling you there is more. Not just within me but within all of us.

I had this idea tonight. In holistic health there is this idea of increasing the amount of healthy foods instead of limiting the bad foods will eventually push out the bad because you won’t crave or need the bad so much. I think the same could possibly work in our society and is somewhat already happening in slow motion right now. We need people to not give up. We need people to keep enforcing positive behaviors more than ever. We need people to not become bots of the matrix and to keep the push for positivity alive no matter how hard it can be sometimes.

I have had this incurable thirst for the belief in the good of this world since I was a child and I am still unwilling to let it go. I have to believe its attainable. I have to believe that’s our goal as a human race. I have to believe we aren’t just here for nothing. To be just a spec of dust hanging in a sunbeam just to dissapear as though we were never here to begin with.

To our knowledge we are the only species to have existed in this universe with our capabilities, and we’re just going to spend it fighting over everything? I can’t. I refuse to believe or accept this as our outcome. We are capable of so much more. Not even in the sense of lets works ourselves to death, but community based building. I know, this isn’t some novel idea. I am just a commoner giving my two cents. Which aren’t even accepted by vending machines anymore, so who am I?

I don’t fucking know man, but fuck capitalism. Ya’ll suck.

There is so much fucking beauty on this Earth and we are wasting it. We are missing it. It is falling through our hands like grains of sand and I am sick of it.

Life isn’t supposed to be this way.