Pax Gaea Human Rights World Post

Roads Less Taken

Everyone knows that I'm here with the family in Mexico to write the "Great American Novel" that has been screwing with my head and breaking my heart for the last fourteen years. But there were a lot of questions as to why it was necessary to quit the job, sell the house, uproot the family and move 3,000 to a foreign country where none of us proficiently speak the language. I have tried to explain this expansively and philosophically but, in truth, it was much simpler than the grand plans and multi-decade long-range economic, philosophic, political plan this is supposed to arise from this first foundational step.

The real reason was to regain my sanity.

I have great friends who understand me as a very complicated individual who has a hard time living in the moment because my head is so far down the road. My entire career has been built on seeing the past and future in ways few can imagine or, quite frankly, care to bother with. As much as I love my dearest and most trusted of friends, we seldom occupy the same head space as they tend to see today or the short term and get so caught up in petty dramas and their "obligations" that rather than do what they want to do, they do what they think they are supposed do. I've had great, visionary employers but they too suffer from this lack of imagination and inspiration to do what is right versus what is necessary.

I've come to believe this the very nature of the American character. We are so focused on doing what we think we should do that we suppress what we want to do and thus, when the pressure of desire becomes greater the need for appearances we reveal our real desires and shatter the illusion of our pretext. Be they conservative republican Christian politicians with an overwhelming desire for teenage boys or conservative, right wing, preachers who officially revile against the rights of homosexuals while they hook up with gay outcall prostitutes and snort lines of crystal meth, my instinct is not to merely revile them for their hypocracy but to pity them. All their lives they have had it beat into them to do what they should do rather than do what they want to do. And because their desire is for something they have been trained to believe is "evil and immoral" their obsession becomes only that much greater. I sincerely believe they think that the more they pray themselves not to feel something and harangue against it, the more likely they are to be "liberated" from their passion. And, in truth, they only become more obsessed and intrigued by their passion and find a totally new thrill in donning hat, dark glasses and fake name and dabbling in that life they truly desire but publicly revile. The outcome is always the same; that living of two incompatible lives will inevitably be exposed and shatter the myth they have so carefully cultivated about themselves. So should we hate and revile the Ted Haggard's and Mark Foley's of the world? No. We should instead look inside ourselves and see what great passion fills our soul but we bury and mask with a facade of responsibility. We then must realize that this great passion will not be denied and should begin to break down our own myth before circumstances unexpectedly shatter the illusion we have so carefully crafted.

That's why I came to Mexico. I have been working full time since I was 14 years old (my first paying job was at 5 working with my father at a crematorium picking nails out of the ashes of the dead with a magnet...yes, that does explain a lot). I was raised to be responsible. I was never a kid. At 14 I was driving for a living (yep, another funeral job... this time hauling bodies from their place of death to the mortuary) two years before I could legally drive. Before I was 18 I had worked in the mortuary business, insurance, travel, newspaper, vitamin, real estate and banking industries. At 18, I was going to school fulltime while still hauling bodies, driving a chemical truck, running convenience stores overnight, serving in the United States Marine Corps Reserve AND running a college radio station. Yes, a lot of drugs were involved because I worked 24/7 six days a week and only slept on Sundays... if time allowed.

In time I was able to relinquish some responsibilities but, to this day, I still function on about three hours of sleep per night (though drug free for the last 17 years if you don't count the coffee and cigarettes) and I still have the need to have a lot of other interests. As well as the book (Jesus Cristo!, this thing is becoming a monster!) I still have Abi's education, my obsession with news and most specifically human rights and constitutional law (expanded now to a worldwide perspective as I've launched a new comparative of the 225 some odd instruments currently in play globally) and my attempts to learn both Spanish and Arabic all with a backdrop of News Talk from NovaMRadio or some random foreign language music station from the country Abi is studying that day. And all of it still doesn't quell my restless mind because I am still gripped with my one great obsession. A series of questions, really:

How can we cut through all the clatter, the bullshit, the biases, the ignorance, the fear that permeates the American character and begin living up to our potential as the saviours of our planet? How is it that the tens of thousands of years of human cultural evolution led us to become this nation we are, with all of our knowledge and resources, to rise to world dominance in just a few hundred years.... an eye blink in the history of our species... and yet we can't we seem to get beyond our childish nature and be real examples of progress? We have the capability of turning the deserts into golf courses... why can't we do that to feed the world? We can drug our children into focused little educational automatons... why can't we create a drug that makes us despise war and destruction and pour it into every water system in the world so we can focus on peace and world prosperity? We can memorize a warehouse full of statistics to craft the perfect rotisserie baseball league or be encyclopedic about our favorite celebrity... so why can't we memorize the names of our state's congressional delegation and build a relationship with them? We can spend hours, hours a day on My Space cyber-stalking our high school crushes so why can't we take a few minutes a day to learn something new about our world, become outraged at an injustice and write a letter of support or condemnation to the appropriate authority? We are the most blessed society the world has ever seen with more wealth, more education, and more capability than any futurist could have ever imagined. So why the hell do we allow ourselves to be manipulated into wars of choice with a foregone conclusion and feign surprise with the inevitable outcome?

What the fuck is wrong with us Americans? Do we want to fail? Are we afraid what might happen to us, to the world, if we truly cared? Do we want to end up like every other empire before us and be relegated to the ash heap of history? Do we want our bones picked over a thousand years from now and have archeologists of the future wonder why, with such potential, we just evaporated from the records or collapsed under our own weight and vanity?
I was like every other American. I had "responsibilities" that kept me from doing what I wanted to do. I wanted to write this book but most importantly I wanted to stop making excuses for why I was doing what was expected versus what was filling up my heart and soul to do since I was a kid. To just, go!

I had a conversation with a friend a few years back when I was seriously contemplating running away to Rio De Janeiro to take up a job as a disc jockey at a Metal radio station. I almost did it but I the only thing that held me back were my "responsibilities". I still have them. I have to take care of my family, educate my children, budget my money to carry us through this great adventure and hope to Gaea the book sells so I don't have to go back to work as a highly productive but under-compensated and unfulfilled tool of corporate America. If I must be crazy focused, at least it is on my family and on a project I hope will allow us to live our lives according to our rules and catering to our desires.

But last week, while our friend Julie was in town for Thanksgiving (we are not holiday people, mind you) I set aside the responsibilities and allowed myself to just enjoy the moment. Rather than taking the super-fast Autopista that would carry us from Guadalajara to Patzcuaro in a little over three hours, we took the back roads that made the journey stretch out to seven hours. We did fine dining at Don Vasco and Cha Cha Cha but likewise ate from roadside vendors that make the most killer food you can imagine. We got pulled into a "Guerilla Thanksgiving" that was one of the most magical events of which I have ever participated. Our dinner companions (we thought would be seven total) were comprised of Julie, our family, a burned out sixty year old hippie (who was the inspiration for the whole event... thank you David), a graduate student from Montreal helping David on the second edition of his Bible of Bamboo, a young Belgian Internet Technician who just quit his job to backpack all over Mexico for a year, an American Doctoral Candidate who is here in Patzcuaro studying the Purhepecha language and a bunch of Mexican nationals who have no clue what Thanksgiving represents. We had no traditional Thanksgiving bird but used "dwarf turkeys" (chickens) in their stead, made the most bizarre, yet wonderful, stuffing comprised of whatever we had in our respective pantries and Julie's southern mashed potatoes recipe stolen from here redneck mother-in-law. It was fabulous! The music (two accordians, guitar and people taking turns on the tambourine, bongo and flute) was dreamlike! We took Julie to all our favorite places here in the Patzcuaro area and it was wonderful. We stayed up late, chatted about life, ate when we got hungry and not once did I worry about the responsibilities. The book. The bills. American politics. The nuances of constitutional law and legal precedents. Nothing.

I was living in the moment. And it was addicting! And when we put Julie on the plane yesterday, I feared that little break from reality would not sustain us through the rest of this adventure. But I was reminded that this is a reality of our making and we can choose to continue to live in each and every moment or we can find a convenient rut to fall into and blame our "responsibilities" for not continuing to seek out the delicious nectar cupped in every flower that makes the every day moments of life so sweet.

Our neighbor Rita just returned from a short trip to the states. I wish Julie could have met her. She's the most fascinating woman I've ever encountered and details her travels in her book, which I am now reading. She's been doing this for 20 years now. If you want to understand what truly inspires people to do the whole ex-patriate thing, she captures it perfectly in her book. I will use her as my on-going inspiration to dip my beak in every succulent flower I encounter along the way.

We start back into the book today. Abi is studying the Pitcairn Islands and I'll flesh out my unsleepable hours with more human rights studies. But I hope that in the process, Julie had a chance to see what we are trying to do here, why we needed to do it and that we didn't come to Mexico to run away from something, we were running to our future... down the back roads of our passions.

posted by Dave Carroll @ 11/28/2006 06:39:00 PM