All Those Things We Wanted
20.03.09
We wanted it all.
We wanted tv with more than three stations, color, and public access and no snow in the picture. Big screen. We wanted racial equality and peace in Vietnam, a lunar lander, and to see what acid tasted like.
We wanted to know what lingo a porpoise talks, the answer to the 64,000 Dollar Question, the lyrics to ‘Louie Louie’, what a quark is, the backside of the moon, and how long it takes a sunspot to register in bacteria in a laboratory petri dish.*
We wanted super size, better gas mileage and a better game than Pong.
We wanted to get rid of pesticides, public smoking, old stereotypes, old thinking, old cars, all those wires behind our electronic equipment, loads of old possessions in June garage sales, and some of those things we thought we wanted earlier, but didn’t want, after all.
Along the way, we shed bell-bottoms, false beliefs, phony friends, a few pounds, long hair, masks, karmic debt, relationships, and our third skin. Some made new relationships, new masks, new debt, new skin.
Don’t we know who we USED to be?
We became. We were always becoming, a work-in-progress. We became teachers. We came gluttonous, we became free, we became unruly, we became abrasive, we became criminal, we became the guy down the street’s notion of who we might have been, we became larger than a dream.
We became respectable. We became someBODY. We became that which we feared, resented, longed for, resigned to, ran from, saw in others.
We wanted that handheld device that delivered what it promised but compromised our creative thinking. Who, What box did we need to think outside of? We wanted every thing that got us here.
How did you get here?
‘You mean, here, to your house…or here, to this point in time…or here, like, earth?’
*you might be thinking, ‘Eight minutes’, right?...the time for light to travel the 93 million miles from our sun to here, us. No. Instantaneously.
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