Not Being At Home Anywhere, but Looking at Home.

The Passing of Tom Reese forced me to sit down a bit and think. Sometimes life forces so much into a small space that it explodes at a keyboard - and if you're lucky, you write something worthwhile. Sometimes you don't. Time tells the difference like a cascaded limerick.

It's amazing what life can cram into five lines. I wish I were so skilled.

So I started thinking about Tom, then realized that I was looking at him through two pairs of eyes - one pair as the 34 year old man I am now, the other as the 20 year old man then. The two pairs of eyes are similar, not the same, time marks the difference like old carvings on a tree. An alarm goes off, things about being 'too young to think like that' pop into my head, and they neatly fold themselves up and pile up in the outbox. There's no need for alarm. I don't regret the 20 year old, I don't regret the 34 year old, and I don't regret the time in between. In fact, the last 14 years have been more fun than my childhood which probably worries people who remember how much fun I had in my childhood.

It didn't help that I just got done reading 'Magic Seeds', by V.S. Naipaul - the review will be written next. Within the book, I borrowed the line which is the title of this entry:

Willie said, "It's the one thing I have worked at all my life: not being at home anywhere, but looking at home."

I imagine that my father's cousin wrote that line from his own experiences as he outgrew his environment. I know that at the end of Chapter 3, with that last line, I put the book down and avoided it for a few hours. Mirrors in writing can be alarming things. Over the past 14 years, there's been some distance put between myself and that mirror. Some call that distance 'an end to innocence', some call it maturing, and some don't even know it exists until it creeps into their deathbed with them and snuggles. I'm not an old man. It's unlikely that I ever will be. My body will hang on me like a suit in need of dry cleaning, I am sure, but I will not become old. It's not in my nature, despite cold flashes of maturity which can be distinctly uncomfortable at times.

My mother made a comment on the entry on Tom Reese, which started me off on this- some of it started coming out with my response, and I stopped. As I wrote earlier, sometimes things explode at the keyboard. Like all of this preliminary stuff, it was disjointed. Over a few hours, it coalesced into what comes next.

The Wanderer

Yeah, I know about the book, 'Taran Wanderer' or whatever - never read it. But growing up, I know all too well about being what TravelerTrish wrote. Yup, halfling. At 20, my core was well mixed; 2 countries and a variety of cultures that were experienced deeper than a sampler platter.

So wherever you go, you look at home even though you never feel it. You smile, you nod, you thumb through faces like a rolodex and you just look like you fit in. You never do. You listen to litanies of things by people who have no original thought but think what they are expressing is, you suffer the bad poets who are always naive egocentric philosophers even when they mean well for others, and in your mind you wonder if you're helping support the illusion by tolerating it. Where the majority rules by weight and volume, the pressure generates diamonds out of simple carbon.

Maybe that's why I've always been most comfortable with the misfits (Third Eye Blind):

My people are the misfits
The ones that don't fit in
With the smile I know it comes within
I can feel you in the corners laughing when the lightings low

They say
Tick tick. tell me where the time goes
Oh life, you know it moves much to slow
Tick tick tell me where the time goes
Those are the ones for me
Those are the ones for me
The misfits, the freaks, the enemy, you and me
Those are the ones for me
Those are the ones for me
The misfits, the freaks, the enemy, you and me

My people are the misfits
I won't let you down
I'm dizzy from whatever we just passed around
I bleed for the moments when we're here
And we're all around

I can't honestly say that I have been friends with anyone that would be considered 'normal'. When I find myself in a crowd, I find the fringe (or, of late, the fringe finds me) so that I can stop or move without being stampeded.

The trouble is that the misfit culture always become cool, and that because they are cool everyone mimics them to be cool. But the original misfits in any way weren't trying to be cool, and aren't considered such unless they acknowledge how cool the people who previously called them 'uncool' now are... or so it seems. 'Kool-Aid' comes to mind, in a very 'Jim Jones' sense.

I listened to Metallica before they were cool (and sometimes I do after they lost their cool). I listened to Alternative Music before it was 'alternative' in a mainstream sense. I hung out at CBGB in New York when it didn't produce anyone real popular, and even got a black eye for the trouble in 1990. I was running Linux before Tux was cool. I was using IRC to transfer files before Napster screwed things up for everyone. I've had websites since 1995; I've had a blog since 1999. I had an MP3 player before the iPod. I had an RX-7 before 'Fast and Furious' put them on the map.

The people I hung with, the misfits, weren't the same group but they were always original. The disenfranchised always group, and I was part of that group then - and probably part of that group now. Looking back at the last 14 years, there is one thing that has consistently changed. My tolerance for accepting 'the norm', or trying to fit into the norm. It just takes too much energy, too much time, too much... me. We spend ourselves in the hope that we get value back, but what we value is subjective and changes with time.

I remember walking into CAMS and reading poetry for the first time. I was nervous, read too fast, wanted to run screaming from the microphone. And I loved that feeling. Nobody died, nobody screamed, and at the end - where I unveiled my poetry to the public for the first time - people applauded. They encouraged. They didn't push, they pulled.

When I look back over the last 14 years, when I see the young man sitting there unscarred, before the first tattoo, before the broken bones, before going to find himself and getting more lost before realizing that the core was always there... well, you can have the popularity contests in all their forms.

Tom was a misfit, and we misfits will miss Tom as any great culture misses a great from within their own culture. Because of Tom, people like him in the sense that they are unlike him and everyone else - well, I'll always be a misfit. I'll never drink the Kool-Aid, but the brownies over there do look pretty good.¹ The path less travelled leads to originality, originality leads to progress... not conformity. Nihil curo de ista tua stulta superstitione.

The Misfit Culture Will Never Be Mainstream

A misfit culture can never be mainstream, because the second it becomes mainstream it is no longer a misfit. Read 'Nation of Rebels : Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture' if you don't believe me; if you don't believe them then wipe the Kool-Aid off of your lips. This applies to so many things - especially 'new' technologies.

At the end of the day, it's really the misfits who are original - the real misfits, that is. And the true beauty of the misfit culture is that there are no leaders. The true misfits don't go around recruiting others to a cause. They just are. And when I look back at that 20 year old, I'm glad that I finally learned to be without the approval and acceptance of others. It's a gift that was given to me over the years by, odds are, people like you.

Yet under it all, I'm almost 100% sure, you're no different. I have no problem saying that the world is a world of misfits. Some just fit together better.

To Be At Home And Not Look It

That's probably the goal. :-)

¹ Not a drug reference (though reading it that way is amusing); this is a personal reference to an experience in Guyana that includes Suriname and Holland. If you don't understand, you're not supposed to.

The picture up top is not clear, but the shape is there and it fits in an extraordinary way. The original image can be seen here, and my mother holds the copyright on the photo, but the original art is something I bought. There's a depth to that photo that maybe 3 living people can begin to understand. I'm one of them, and I still sit like that.