To be free, unchained, naked, together, alive.

I have tried, in my way, to be free, unchained.

I expanded out from the cities, created the suburbs, where I could possess my own estate, deep in the ocean of nuclear families, their backyards and their lockable rooms.  I paid no landlord, I owned my own home, though the bank submerged me in debt for decades of my short lifetime.  Their arbitrary authority was sold to me like a noble charity; the charity of the hardworking.  I am the Lord God of my own nation-state, numbered and geometrically mapped by city planners.  My hands stink not of dirt and grease, but of disinfectant.

I feel an all-encompassing love for everyone around me, but it is heavily encumbered with the futility of my financial culture.  Everything I want is obscured by the price tags on objects to clutter and confuse my life.  I fill my life with these objects, hoping to uncover the pristine peace and emptiness beneath them, but I always need more.

I fill my lonely soul with philosophies that sicken me like too much candy, and the cynicism I am left with causes me to nihilistically accept the secular materialism that advertising bludgeons me with.  I am told there is no God/dess and I have no soul.  The contradiction in my experience of the world is a shameful secret.

I walk in nature and strive to wander until the traffic is inaudible, but when I reemerge into what they facetiously call the Real World, its bland perversity sends me into a repressed fit of despair.  I read revolutionary texts, but it makes me feel too sad and I yearn for the mind-numbing entertainment specifically manufactured to drown out this Real World that its presence unambiguously perpetuates.

I glance through the glass-pained window and notice the moon is full.  I try to project myself into a world where this monthly celebratory moment has some significance, but the rhythms and cycles of television programming do not take the moon into account.  Natural phenomena are not considered relevant in this Real World I inhabit.  They are quaint symbols of dead religions at best, like faded and chipped Coca-Cola logos on long-abandoned convenience stores.

I can get naked and dance around the backyard with my family watching, amused, but it will be a travesty.  This will be no shared experience, I won't feel the breathing earth underneath the concrete, there will be no fire to get sweaty around and no natural body of water to dive into subsequently.  I won't feel the thrill of life coursing through my body, it will be a display for the attendants and assistants and employees I live with.

At best they will appreciate it as an expression of my personality, what distinguishes me from them, like a birthmark or a homosexuality, as acceptable and irrelevant as an outbreak of acne.  All diversity is accepted and assimilated in Capitalism's Democracy pageant.  Every flavour, every colour of the rainbow is represented and available for purchase.

The only exception is the illegal and the illegal is, by definition, necessary to marginalise and eradicate by otherwise abhorrent means.  The illegal is the very problem we face here in the Real World of the Legal, sanctioned, culturally-defined, personality-diverse extravaganza of materialistic accumulation.

I scorn that within the world and within myself that I feel powerless to transform.  I resent that I do not know how to change what I hate, and I resent more my fear or unwillingness to change what I know precisely how to change.  Too much clarity, too much sensitivity and empathy is dangerous in the Real World.

To see things through my own eyes, rather than the eyes prescribed by the media, is painfully revealing, like being exposed naked in front of the whole school, like those dreams I used to have that my clothes, my personality, my cultural veneer, vanished, and I was left, naked, together, alive.