Rat Race

Today I woke up in the middle of walking to my car like a hamster on a wheel. Hamsters probably don't think as philosophically as I did today and do sometimes -- but maybe they do... who knows?

I'm sure there have to be others who do this -- just... WAKE UP. Today I looked into the heart of downtown Fort Wayne at all the frantic cars and upper middle class women tiptoeing on heels in skirt-strides and men looking stately in ridiculously (I'm sure) priced suits and I had a spidey-sense kind of vision that behind their designer sunglasses is a cynical confusion. For any one of them, there's that temporary blissful thought that crosses his mind - "I look good" -- but there has to also be "Shit... I really don't want to sit at a desk all day under fluorescent lights in front of a glaring screen and wait for so-and-so with their such-and-such problems to drain my mind with their ..." and so it goes. I can't even write about it, it's that boring. Is anyone having any fun at all?

I know I, for one, don't want to be here. I can attest to Linda, also. Her boyfriend is a drain and though she loves him on an accepting level and he's her best friend, she's sick of him. The job bores me after three months, so surely it bores her after 11 years. And Rob. Rob HATES this hamster wheel. He's got an amazing wife but he's a dad and a worker and he has to crunch numbers all day long and avoid "the man." Carol is so overrun by her controlling nature she actually thinks she LOVES her job and her life. Rachel's getting out but just getting right back in, and even deeper. I could go on.

The thinking started when I took my second smoke break of the morning (any excuse to remove myself from the monotony for any precious blip of time) and thought "Gee, I'd really like to be white-water rafting right now or anything else relatively stimulating." The insanity then kept circling and building. Next was "What are we doing here? What's happening? Why are we killing ourselves?" And then "Oh yeah... we have to make money to survive." And then "Survive for what? To die?"

The hamster wheel. The rat race. But there's more. We settle down with one singular person. Then we realize that's insane also, so we cheat or we break up. We have children because we obsess over having someone look like us or fantasize about the sweet idea of buying tiny shoes and then we curse ourselves later when the children are still there but less cute and more obnoxious and demanding. We commit to jobs, people, credit cards, classes and the list goes on until we're running and running and running and we fail to acknowledge the only thing ever truly certain and proven and so obvious it cannot be and will never be proven wrong, that being time and change. And with time and change, regret. And the impossibility to predict either. If change falls out as time rolls over, and there is no fool-proof way to determine what change will appear, regret is inevitable. I am suffering from it and everyone else is too in some capacity even if they're slow to admitting it. Who can be judged for being impulsive when impulsiveness is the only way left to control the time and the change even for one moment of it?

Final thought: this is no preach. I believe in what I just said about as much as I believe in anything else - very little. But that, as with anything else, could change.