Of all the lives to choose, we only call some of them life. Even when we go somewhere else, be something else, it's hard as hell to shake that.
I'm in the crowd, and it's in me, on me, through me. Today I'm letting it seep past the filters, allowing myself to feel it: wants, needs, spikes of anger and loathing, sorrows soft as unstrung violins, satisfactions like warm honey, ice cream, mint. All of it.
And beside the inward motions, the flutter of eyes, seeing and not, responses sight evokes, provoking the unseen.
Oh children, hipster children, scenester, shag, and box jean children: most of you will choose to live as your parents do, when the pressure's on. Irreconcilable differences will seem much less important, then, when you have to choose what you'll keep, what you're willing to pay for. That's why your parents did, and most of you who can, will.
A few can't, or run so deep in the habit of "won't" that they believe they can't. For them, a harrowing, dangerous path, more dangerous than you'd believe. Ten years till you'd believe the tamest of my stories, of her that was her speaking in creaks, hinges damp and swollen rot from last night, and we're not into that. Not into that, or I'd be someone else, talking Samadhi and Tao and death.
For the night is so long, and food never sticks...
But worth it. Make it through, keep "why" alive, and you've got a shot to find and make life better than living offered.
To get there, you have to survive. All of you, thought and feeling more than breathing. You have to be able to look up from your feet, beyond the bounds of your habits.
Lean from hard living, body baked as clay in the sun, sweating out its water, you'll have to get so damn hard to make it through, and there you have to be careful. Hard enough, quick enough, swift and savage enough to survive it, but keeping a softness in yourself so that there's something in you worth keeping alive, worth paying what you'll pay. You'll have to be quicker than your peers, mostly of mind, because you're not just keeping the flesh alive: you're also protecting the spirit, the hope, the eyes that can see good things, the heart that can recieve them.
You have to make it through the fire, and still have something of you on the other side.
You've got to be able to look up from your feet and really, truly see.
You'll hear all kinds of words for "you", like whore, or thief, or monster. Some of them may even be true, but if you listen, listen so carefully, you'll learn that the heart of those words is true, because they're all just synonyms for "outside".
And you are outside. That's okay, others are too.
You'll learn to see them in the crowd: whores, thieves, monsters, cons, magicians, pickpockets... people like you, living by illusion and guile. "Outside" isn't where you are, even how you look, but how you look for what you eat, how you find it, how you eat it.
You don't want to divide the world into the made and the marks, into people aware and those waiting to lose their wallets or worse. You don't want to draw hard lines between sharks, bait, and your next meal, not when they're all people, but you will, even if you remember that they're people (and it's so important that you do).
It doesn't matter if you're kind or cruel, how your trickery is plied, whether you play the game at all... least of all that, because the first question that matters is whether you can. If you can, you will, and the only honest company you'll find is other scoundrels, not because the others lie. Because they don't know how not to: they're talking truth from a different world, and see nothing of yours.
Whether they call you a whore, thief, or most duplicitous of all, an artist, an actor, you'll spot others by how they move: hand, step, and eye. You'll see them setting up their montes, blinds, bumps, baffles, as habitual and helpless as your own setups are. They can't help it any more than you.
You'll weave illusion, misdirection, balances, and hooks into nets and snares: catch dollars, catch ideas, catch preconceptions, spear them while they're tangled. You're not quite sure which tricks harm, which truths are worse, or when those lines got so blurred when others are so clear, but you're not alone there.
Children dwell in that realm of half-knowns, and half-believe in fairy tales. Which halves, the beginnings and ends, or those mysterious middles, they've yet to decide, for they are children. There may be truth to the stories of children bewitched away to fairyland. That may even be your story, little changeling-swapped Tamberlanes, mine, but some of us were born here.
Native or immigrant, we live less in the middle of things than between them.
We may call it deception, trickery, a cheat, to make things seem more or less than they are, and that is true. That is true. But that is also the nature of magic, of wonder, of the inspirations that bring new things into being.
And lest we find ourselves cynical and calling such workings but the twiddling of thumbs to distract from the inexorable clicks of a clockwork universe: it is also the nature of knowledge and inquiry to look on a thing and see more in it, and less of it, than our first glances would suggest.
Oh children, those among you who hear this and know it to be true: charlatans are midwives by which the future is born.
