Experience

If I were to take all my experiences and mesh them into one occupational position--it would be to create a treatment center for emotionally-disturbed private school-educated kids of gypsy descent. There, I would teach them writing, kickboxing, imperfect veganism, and proper contraception implementation. I would treat them from their addictions to god, to family obligation, to morality as a washboard for our animal instincts, to guilt, to Myspace. And this center would be in a former Communist nation where there would still be only two types of cheese--yellow and white. I'd recycle my diploma into toilet paper. Ivy League 2-ply. Each morning, we would climb the metaphorical walls of our defenses before settling into our Moleskins and/or Macbooks, where we'd rappel into philosophical caves, rooms of our own, walls padded with the insulation of our old bullshit, writing character sketches for our self of the day. At recess, we'd have a pep rally, cheering on our own genius ideas.

"G-E-N-I-U-S! Gooooo Genius!!!"

At lunch, we'd photograph trees, bury first drafts in self-destructing time capsules, invent 10 new ways to eat pumpkin, stuff kaleidoscopes with fortune cookie fortunes, laugh at the distortions, the possibilities, laugh at our pasts which we've pulled from our mind like a loose shirt thread and re-woven into a quilt large enough to cover our cold feet. At night, we'd reclaim constellations, snip every imaginary line connecting memories to fear, expectation to fear, preservation to fear. Cassiopeia into The Persistence of Memory. The Big Dipper into Guernica. We'd praise the sky as a figment of our imaginations. We'd be as endless as we wanted to be. And at last, we'd take our fears, write them on gold origami paper, folding each into 1,000 cranes, into one crane in the shape of a kite, and fly our fears past the point of control, and let them go, let them all go.

And then we'd be free for the first time in our lives.