Suburbia - Strivers

For much of the time out here in the lily white i feel as if i'm in a Phillip K. Dick novel, i do not understand the inhabitants of this planet but like a good android i sit quietly and politely by, nodding and smiling thoughtfully when i'm really just processing how nuts this fucking place is, i mean i don't really have much to say to the average resident of my suburb, they often talk of this place called "church", yes of course i realize these places exist but what they call church and what i might refer to nonchalantly as church are two different things entirely, i'm often asked if i belong to a church and i usually tell people that i am a Dudeist, not only a Dudeist but a Dudeist priest, legally allowed to perform weddings and shit like that. Most often i am met with a wonderfully blank stare and the follow up, did you say Buddhist? to which i reply that while i was once an existential Buddhist i'm now a Dudeist (carefully enunciated) and that while they are practically the same thing, Dudeism is a bit more lax in it's taboos, social or otherwise, to which i'm often met with another blank stare and a changing of the subject or better still a polite "excuse me" while said suburbanite runs away from me...

The one thing i find fascinating in my whole study of this disaster called humanity is the roles played and images built by the suburbanites, i often observe and retain rather silly and useless information that i hear people say, maybe it goes back to the dealer days and an understanding of how to work people or maybe it's just a defense mechanism cuz i have no "career" and possibly an inferiority complex therefore i attempt to show a vast retention of useless info about people to be pulled out at later dates and regurgitated much like the word vomit that takes place in the average conversation amongst the soccer moms, but i do observe and i do think and i do write and the folly of it all is always interesting and amusing... at least to me...

Which brings me of course to the Strivers, yes i know my faithful reader, you are sitting back and screaming plagiarism, isn't Strivers fucking close to Achievers? just like in the movie? yes you could say that but i'd say semantics is everything and that while they may seem the same Achievers have a well defined goal while Strivers are more pissing in the wind, they are trying but i'm not sure what the goal is/was/were, it's as if they are playing a part that they were told to play long ago, and yes once again it could be pointed out that we're all just playing parts in some cosmic tragedy and you'd be right but fuck all that, with enough grass we could come up with concepts and arguments and counter-arguments all night.  But i will say that the Strivers are a strange breed indeed, confusing this stoned neanderthal who sits typing for reasons not fully known...

Now while i am loathe to stereotype or pigeonhole it is also necessary to explain my hypothesis, when i think of Strivers there is one couple in particular that comes to mind, i don't know them well but i watch and wonder, the world is a large zoo and i enjoy watching the animals in their various cages, of course what i could be watching is the crumbling of a marriage and that is also quite possible but after a few years i believe it would have crumbled already.  The part i watch is the complete lack of joy in all that they do, and they are always doing something, attaining more degrees to climb the ladder of success, studying and working, raising children that from the looks of it they don't really seem to want, it's a foreign concept to me because i can say unequivocally that if it wasn't for the boyos i'd be fucking brown bread but that has been stated here on more than a few occasions, it seems that if they could have had the 1.7 children we Merkins are having per family these days they'd have done just that, it's .3 less of a hassle in their eyes...

Now maybe i'm just some fucking hippie in grunge clothing, i mean we all don't have to have some special fucking purpose (a phrase i stole from Naven Johnson in The Jerk), in fact i'd wager there is abso-fucking-lutely no point to this brief stay of consciousness here on planet Earth other than to enjoy it the most you possibly can, why the fuck wouldn't you? the Alan Watts work as play schtick in a sense and the belief that why would one want to go on living a miserable existence?  these Strivers seem to be miserable chasing shit and of course when they attain said shit it will no longer be a cherished as it once was and they will move the goalposts even further in order to keep up the feeling of miserableness that they have come to love like that bluebird in Hank's heart... and maybe it is i who am the strange bird for believing that people would possibly sit down now and then and reflect on their fucking existence, to reflect on their happiness or lack thereof  because either can be infectious, but sadly i feel they don't, and that is the biggest crime, you can't take a fucking thing with you into the dust so the money and the status and the trinkets are useless, you are now a memory and will that memory bring a smile to the face of the people who knew you or will it bring a shrug, a sigh, a frown and shaking of the head...

And so out here in Suburbia this android watches, i study and scratch my chin, sometimes i attempt to make sense out of things and sometimes i know there is no sense to be made, we bi-peds have been bumbling around here for years and we never seem to get any wiser except when it comes to expanding our fears, phobias, and mental illnesses and of course the pharmaceuticals that treat them, the rest is a crap shoot, i wonder about these Strivers and why they do what they do, i know i don't want to be one, i don't understand their game, i understand it takes place and that most of the people i come into contact with on a daily basis are playing it, i also know that like Jean-Jacque Rousseau i've have stumbled into an absurd gig that gives me the freedom to avoid much of the straight world and to ponder my navel and to pull tubes in the garage and to listen to the birds sing and observe the groundhog run, maybe the new revolution starts at home and never gets off the couch... so it goes...

(There is the Wilderness Years, now there is Suburbia- theme music above)