Thanks for the reading list. I'll google these names. I should read more. Being absorbed in a book is always a good thing, but it's so rare I really get absorbed.
I once spent a day in London wandering around. I liked it. From the news media and from my annoying jaunts through the airports, my impression of GB is of an emerged security state where people get arrested for over feeding their cats. Is it collapsing under the weight of idealism and alcohol without the sustaining beauty of the continent? England was always such a politically temperate society. The tweedy English glum, the novels, the beer swilling Yorkshire farmers, Prince Charles suggest in my mind an escape from sex, from passion, from some sort of legitimate core human experience that is also an innately destructive experience. And then there is Gatwick and Heathrow.
But yeah. That is what is happning in the world, and it's interesting. I think my problem is that I feel victimized by it. I am on the outside with no means of comment in any particular form, no avenue of engagement. My parents were imperfect in their particular way, and the outcome of whatever genetic propensities coupled with nurture somehow produced the strange amalgum of good and bad that is me. This amalgum however can bearly tread water within the complexities you detail. I am simply at a loss. I have tried and failed and there never ever was someone standing in the wings egging me on with love despite my own drunken foolishness. I am but a fly on the windshield. So why not drink a fifth of whiskey? I guess, because over the last two months I have tasted something else, some kind of harmony. I just want to see what happens if I am silent for a change.
I view the dynamics you detail more as a struggle than a foregone conclusion in which the world dies. A very gradual process of awakening. I found myself mistakenly looking at an Obama aphorism yesterday. Be the change, or something like that. It's unlikely that something like that could have been uttered perhaps even 20 years ago. So, I'm not giving up on it yet. I just wish I had a way to engage, to be something that wasn't a solitary, struggling temp worker who can't get a date.