50,000,000 elvis fans cant be wrong? I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floor of silent seas

Abstract: I dont get it, the people who send their children to private schools to learn about writers artists and historical figures would do anything in their power to disuade them from following in the footsteps of said artists,writer and historical figures. As if to say " it was ok for them but dont risk it, dont you dare trade security for liberty".Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men's reality. Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of ''the rat race'' is not yet final.

	50

Such are the trappings of middle class and I would be lieing if I wrote that I wasnt deeply indebted to and angry with them. Part of being the child of parents who carefully designed their life so that you would be able have the utmost ability to, in turn, design the lives of your children ( as we are inevitably expected to reproduce) is sitting down at dinner tables in anonymous and spooky suburbs, to talk about the direction your life should take, and to listen and share about how this could look. Here is how it looks:


We pull into our parking spot in the neighbors driveway, one large home that remains vacant with a giant price tag on it in a faltering economy. I have dawned a pair of Khakis and a j crew heather v neck sweater. February is miserable and I pick and choose my steps carefully as not to get my shoes dirty. A friends father greets us and pleasentrys are exchanged before we are invited to sit at a dinner table and eat a feast of crab, Music from a farther room. Light bends warmly through wine glasses and reflects off of what appears to be josef albers painting of japanese cherry blossoms. The whole of the house is warm and spirits are high and the smell crab compliments it all nicely

Something is off here, before the last crab is cracked I will know why,and with whom. the mood seems to change as I sit at the table,the clinking of crystal and the cracking of crab, the various side conversations are like the sounds one hears while listening out their window to the seasons change. Even the light, the artifical light provided on tracks, as was chic when the house was built, seems to change, to shift on the artificial horizon untill it feals the way it does during winter months. Were talking about alaska in the context of " what have you been doing with your life." My thoughts shifted to the neuter austerity of those fishing grounds with idealism. " Well now that you have done that type of thing you know you dont ever have to go back, no no, I understand, its good to get it out of your system while your young." I think about king crab season.

LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky

I think about the sunsets at midnight and king salmon as large as second graders.

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats	5
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …	10
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

My friends mother talks about the fact that education allows us the ability to work with our brains rather than with our bodies, and that fishing is dangerouse and our education gives us the opportunity not to do this...

There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;	30
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

A toast to a special friend is made and glasses are clinked and conversations continue. a former class mate and friend replies to the mother and things became clearer, the mood seemed less unclear and the host of the evining began to reveal its self.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—	40
[They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”]
Do I dare	45
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

" Fishing provides no time for someone to have a regualr life, where you can build toward things and show up in peoples lives." It hit me that I am the one who is off, the lives most people want are normal, their not crazy I am... 50,000,000 elvis fans cant be wrong, but freedome is something that dies unless its used, here I reach a crossroads if I am wrong, and the nine to fivers are right then several long held beliefs are wrong as well. I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.

I dont get it, the people who send their children to private schools to learn about writers artists and historical figures would do anything in their power to disuade them from following in the footsteps of said artists,writer and historical figures. As if to say " it was ok for them but dont risk it, dont you dare trade security for liberty".Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men's reality. Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of ''the rat race'' is not yet final.




No one wonders why Americans have a love affair with clint eastwood or tony soprano, why working professionals return home and watch Deadliest Catch propelling it to number one on primetime. No one says it but it is present at that table, a very quiet fear, a very quiet sadness and lonelieness and desperation. Im not above it, im scared, the only difference between me and the uneducated "who have no choice but to work with their bodies" is that I can be much more articualte about the fear, much more vocal about what it is that scares me... thats the thing my education gave me... but if I am carefull and patient and honest, I can persue eduaction in the hopes that it will relieve this fear, thats the real mark of being schooled, we can transcend it, we can think and it will.

"That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now."

For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,	50
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—	55
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?	60
And how should I presume?

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets	70
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. . . . . .
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!	75
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?	80
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,	85
And in short, I was afraid.