“Moss grows fat on a rollin' stone
But that's not how it used to be”
~ Don McLean, “American Pie”
“And the Lord God said,
“It is not good that man should be alone.”
~ Moses, “Genesis 2:18”
It was mid November of the first semester of my second year in seminary. I had been going through some things earlier on the semester dealing with what I believed to be my failures as a servant of God and the guilt and shame of what can too often be interpreted as sins.
Myself and a friend from school had just returned from Charleston, South Carolina with what is called ‘spice’ or ‘K-2’, a synthetic version of weed and terrible for your health. Stick to the real stuff.
Anyway, we both lived on campus, or “the Bunks”, at the time and would walk to a grove of trees on the edge of the church’s property where we sat on tree stumps and smoked. The school we went to was filled with good, morally sound Christians and if anyone ever saw us walking around at midnight around the school and church grounds they would be safe to assume we were praying.
I had only started smoking pot and cigarettes full-time a couple months before and it was maybe the fifth or sixth time I did anything drug or alcohol related. I was nineteen at the time and I was twenty-one when I first got drunk. I was a new to getting high and my mind would still freak out from time to time.
We passed the pipe back and forth talking about the fun stuff you talk about when under the influence when suddenly I turned quiet in introspection. My mind was in outer space and I began to laugh inwardly as I thought about how funny it would be to become stuck in the orbit of earth. I had a spacesuit on that would feed me and it had a bathroom which would extinguish my waste and I would live to be an old man and then die. It was funnier in my head.
Then out of nowhere, to my friends surprise, I began to weep. My heart rate was racing and I was having a faint panic attack as the hilarity of the situation playing in my head grew into something sad and frightening. To be lost in orbit forever looking down at the earth, the planet, the place where all your loved ones are, seeing them live their lives, and seeing them loving one another. Watching the world become something of beauty. And there you are, in space, alone, without joy, without people, without nothing but yourself and your thoughts and without any way of ending the loneliness. Only to wait for your death.
The reason I talk about this bad “trip” is to exemplify the idea that its not good for man to be alone. When man is alone he festers. A good friend of mine conducted a poll that asked people, “What is your biggest fear?”. The answers ranged from death, loss of a loved one, and to the ridiculous realms of my own fear of frogs and and being stuck orbiting the earth for eternity. Except for the frog bit, what all these fears of mankind boiled down to whether its, I don’t know, nuclear holocaust, or invasions of armies of people of a different color or creed, or simply the fear of someone not liking you, is loneliness.
Loneliness can fuck you up something fierce. I have spent the majority of my life alone and for the last few years I have circled the planet fulfilling what I’m coming to understand as a drug induced premonition. Wondering the vastness of the internal space of my mind, and my faults and failures and the shit I put myself and others through. It drove me crazy to the point of cutting myself while watching “The Drew Carey Show” stuck in the disillusionment of my own selfishness.
That was the worst of it and I’ve gotten over that part of this journey of finding myself. I’ve since done other things that have put at stake my sanity but nothing quite that far on the edge.
The question I have to ask is, “Where is the happy medium between being a rolling stone and being settled a human being?” Rolling stones are wrecking balls brought about by changes in their respective downhill environment.
Some people are born at the top and some are born at the bottom. The bigger you are the harder you fall and more clearly your fall is seen. How do the small, the bottom dwellers, the plecostomus of bullshit social structures create change. Gandhi, Jesus, Martin Luther King Jr, Lenny Bruce; how did they get to the top of the mountaintops of their times?
I have a theory. There is no north. There is no south. There is only over there and over here. The world is round and every point is center and foremost. We are all the center of our own respective universes. Everything revolves around us, truly, and its when our orbits collide that problems arise. We are all equally important and equally worth a fighting chance.
If there is no up and and their is no down and we all live in a circle what’s the purpose of the third dimension? Its the fabric of life, the interchange of energy, the love and the hatred and the endless repetition of history we never fucking learn from.
Hermits, lone-star cowboys, tomcats, homeless people, the old people, the career folks, the happy people all feel to the wayside. They are all settled stones, pillars erected in monument to the change wrought on by their time spent free-falling. And the line that runs center is the path of the rolling stone racing past all the fallen oaks of dead and forgotten people. These people have become irrelevant and bereft of life.
But the dead live on as the fertilizing sacrifice of the human condition. And we all settle. Eventually all cease and its upon the carcasses of our dead asses that the third dimension is built. And the things that were once so low slowly climb like infectious kudzu to the top and blossom out evolving, as we do, into the turmoil filled beauty.
Is it good for man to be alone? Yes, no, I think? True he festers. True he dies inside. True life may not have been too much fun. But the fat moss he becomes produces habitat for humanity, a place for us to quarrel and bicker and love and to grow into hills and mountaintops where yet more stones are born to roll eventually to fall and crush the floor and till the fallow grounds of a desperate culture in search of utopia.
Feel free to call it socialism. I’ll call it hope.
Unsure as always,
KJ out.
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