“You haven't thrown your son out into the winds of change unprepared to cope with them. His anger comes more from an unsorted out confusion then from regret. It is sanctuary he needs and fights at the same time.”
I comprehend that. Yes sir.
“His world, very much like the world of my fictional rich friend above, has been temporarily tilted from the center he's always been able to depend upon by those new acquaintances you describe as ‘bound and determined to express their free-will.’ There's enough contradictory in that statement to conclude that they're sharing values which they've been, by inculcation, determined to share.”
I had to look up “inculcation”.
Conceivably there are those as you say, surely there are, in fact it’s what I’d thought he’d run around with in College, but it’s not the ones Fletcher Bear has taken in with (...or maybe only rogues lone wolf on the fringes of, which is conceivable to me). & I don’t blame them, completely, they are who they have become n our son is who he has become in and around the house Maya and I attempted, from day one, to make into a good home. & somehow the life he has lived this eighteen-nineteen years has mystifyingly led to this blatantly burdensome blueprint in his life that is being manifested in a fashion as to be the perfect unreal-world championship wrestling amalgamation top tag team partner to leukemia in manufacturing tension, shock & awe ‘round here lately, & this is not a timid home for the weak-kneed set. ...You can't hit like a girl and floor us.
I know, teens goin’ 20s! I was one, you were one. But how Fletcher Bear has come to embrace moral nihilism is so effing beyond me. He claims we don’t have a clue as to the 21st Century. Wow. That’s a paradox of the cell phone era, to say the least. Here’s an industry that has raped & pillaged our youth of their silence...and self. Even though we, who have made the time and shared the inclination, tried to integrate the analog and natural/physical world into our everyday---or, better than every so often---activities.
Probably this thread has gotten too personal for some, & so be it…but I respect the body of panelists herein, for the most part, and handy peers of higher consciousness are not a dime a dozen anymore. Not… when most people we know, having forgotten what found them so endeared to each other to begin with, have divorced and are now living “single” lives again. It narrows the circle. Has us reminiscing the late 80s, early 90s, a little too often…& so maybe it’s good to put this perhaps laughable perhaps pitiful stuff out their into the jury of admired communal opinion---may not be good for internet or maybe it will. I don’t know. It is real. I am hung up on it because I have pictures of my sons all around me. This kiddo means the world.
Yours is a romantic rationalization, Heathcliffe, and usually I’d be taken completely in by it, as a philosophical principle. I myself am a drastic romantic, ask anybody. But my son isn’t quite as described in your post, not lately, and neither are the nihilists he’s spending time with. This is life from a muddier middle, a grayer obscurity, perhaps, than your rapt-eloquent illustration. Believe me, I want to consider it. No doubt you are speaking from experience and sharing gold that needs be considered & reconsidered….But I have NEVER in my life seen anybody go from one extreme to the other so unfortunately. The ideas he’s bringing home are not merely notions beyond my or Maya’s personal comfort zone scope ...uh…of accepted wisdoms; no way, my friend, jails are filled with young men with mindsets not so dissimilar to this young buck’s newfound outlook. AND it blows. But I’m trying. …I’m really, really trying …to be here, nearby, with an open mind, when the dawn breaks. ...I DO believe he is working through something...amidst the din of all that's happened...and all that are his notions of present-day America, circa 2009.
One freakin’ 21st Century day at a time
(all this considered…while…a week ago I spent an hour in a practice room beside him while he improvised musical colors on piano that had me spooned & crooned, forlorn & love torn, lifted and floored by the sounds emoting from his heart & hands…and a ten minute walk back to my car as he spoke poetically about every girl passing by, …
his enthusiasms swimming with flights of hopes and dreams and the plans of a young man surrounded by halls of books, ideas, tools, attitudes, curriculums, doors standing open & doors waiting closed but unlocked and doors locked but with keyholes awaiting keys; this is the kid who opened the senior spring concert with an original composition on electric piano,
but it’s a rare look at him, the he that has taken a beating from the him that he now favors.)
(Comes to mind) I wrote a poem...when I was sampling college, hard to believe...so long ago, …and it may or may not help me to come to terms with Fletcher Bear’s present pathways, as it is probably true: all of us thinking, breathing, toiling beings are want of struggle & peace, struggle & peace.
Let's see if I can dig it up out of one of the 4 journals dusty in the corner over there...and transcribe it. Hey, I was a kid…hehe…piss-n-vinegar n all....)
Malignant? Indignant
Oh, the fuck with it
Sitting here n thinking
How pathetic it all is
Happy every day
Sad every day
A ridiculous circle
Trends?
Man fucks man
Man accepts it
God terrorizes man
Through...the mouths
Of fundamentalist teachers
---Professors & priests
Of their own faith in
Fear, loathing,
Another smoke bomb
Thrown into the crowd
Another...bluecoat
clubs in a student’s knees
People on their bellies
---in lieu of protest---
A cop aims a gun n shoots!
Innocence…bleeds
Between concrete slabs
& lies there; Dead
For what? For God?
For your gentle mother,
who asks you to clean your plate,
And believes (worth watching
Your father beat you down)
In what He demands?
Who’s really the father?
Darkness on Earth?
Lightness in the sky?
This isn’t the only
Ball in the stars
Is it... ...the only
Pitiful life in eternity?
So…beat us shitless earth-god
You!
…Who carries the biggest
Wallet. The biggest Gun
The biggest belly! The
Biggest Book! …The
Biggest self-interest
Lock us up within YOUR walls
Of proscribed and calculated
Deterioration. Rip at our
Blind-as-a-cave reality
Own our hearts & minds
With every dollar you print
Yes!…
Beat us into near submission
And we’ll still say, "Fuck You!"
(No doubt an ambitious protest/rant out of the mouths of babes…that I’m none too sure I have in me anymore…not because I’ve ceased to care…but because…oh……the circle has…narrowed. Though the heart & angst still remains: There are those who still contend that greed, envy, anger, and hatred cannot hold a candle to compassion, love, & hope. But that remains to be seen I suppose. “Do not go gentle into that good night,”)
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15377
