para la gente de la calle

I took a drag from my cigarette and passed it down the line. The line of drunken vagabonds that are deadly at night. I gave it to the lady that sat on concrete steps pleading for the poison that makes her a warm and friendly sight. They came together and fought poverty when birds took the North flight. When the coldness swept through the streets of Santiago, it was in the papers and the news. And I wondered why they did that, why they even cared, why some people tried to reason, and why some others simply stared. I wondered how they got there, and then I saw the youth. No judgment passed from me, it was just my heartbeat of truth. And if rhythmic sounds could speak, of injustice passed down the line—from drunken father, to hoodlum son, from a pregnant girl to her boyfriend’s drugs—then my heart would beat the world ‘till our ears would simply hear no more. I’d cry the tears that the old men can’t. When you find out you’re nothing better than alugien sin casa, alguien para nada.

So I come back to the place where dreams of greed gratify men in suits. Men in suits that speak of the current spending bills, putting it all on our TV screens as if the big numbers fit there so easily. We’ve been in Iraq for a while now, and both parties don’t see us getting out. We sit in our houses though, we sit in our beds, and we pretend that politics will be over when Bush is dead. But it’s not the man, or the men that are in charge. It isn’t the administration that liberals try to blame so hard. It’s the system in which we live, where individualism is held above the common good. You know Communism is extreme, and socialism simply can’t work. Yet all we require is security, and no one knows that a gun won’t provide this and that the last question of life might be ideology, Hey Mr. President What’s that worth? Because when you think you can fight, and when you think you can run, ladrones from every corner have a blade running up and into your lungs.

But people won’t know this and will never have the interest to learn. They won’t learn the words of another language, they won’t read any other religion, they can’t open the book of statistics and figure out who’s suffering through this war, they won’t run down to South America and feel the stickiness of injustice in the air. So I require one thing of myself, since it’s the only thing I can sometimes choose in this cruel and useless world. When I die I’ll die like the meek, those that will come up one day to take this Earth from the hands of a few fucked corrupt white men.

I’ll be there, right before the true revolution begins. I’ll die a human’s death, one of no heroic deed or glory. And I’ll be there in the streets with my compañeros, alugien sin casa, alugien para nada—someone for what is justified.

Control. It’s something hard to understand. Maybe I don’t really get it at all, or maybe, just maybe, I understand it a little. Control is a lot of things. For scientists, it’s something for their experiments. But for the majority of any kind of person, it means something totally different. Control is something we all strive for. It’s built into our systems, into our way of being, and we don’t question it often. But it’s still there. You know when you see a little kid, and he wants a cookie, but his mom says, NO. Well, Billy is still going to pursue the idea of that cookie. He won’t stop because his Mom said, No. And so he kicks and screams. He throws a tantrum. Then the Mom, if she’s a nice one, tries to soothe him with words. Billy, you can get a cookie next time. But that little fucker still wants that cookie. His tantrum becomes rage, and an epic battle between Mother and Child ensues. Finally, she slaps the kid saying, Jesus Christ Billy, I said, No. And within the tears of Billy’s face, there is the symbolic significance of what control is.

Control is what we find in relationships. Sometimes, we say that women have control over men. Other times, women yell their outrage at the unequal treatment they receive. But within both types of sayings, control is still present. Control doesn’t stop, and we all say that we like to think we are in control. Of course, we say, “We can’t control everything, we’re just human.” But that’s so much bullshit. Control is probably the most humanistic behavior I have ever encountered. I see it more than anger, or happiness. I see it in the faces of my professors that want to tell me that I’m ignorant. Maybe I am stupid, and maybe learning their material will enlighten me so much, that I’ll be the next Buddha. Who knows?

But my theory on control is as follows. We are all weak. And to most things, we are attached to that more than we want to admit. We find comfort in loved ones we take for granted. We don’t want to think that someday, they’ll die, or someday, they’ll say, Well now that I’ve loved you all this time, I’m kind of tired, so Uhh.. I’m just gonna like, head out somewhere. No, we want to think those people will stay with us. And when we go through breakups or some bitch, or some asshole, tells us, Well, Uhhh, it’s not you hun, it’s me, we obviously resort to one human quality. What, the, fuck. That’s all we can think. We scream it and its origins are known but as complicated as any theory of how the universe came to be. The emotion we create within our guts, the screams we hear in the night, and the tears we will cry as we stare at the stars wondering how the fuck we fit into this greater system, all comes back to control. We throw tantrums, and we pretend to say that we live our lives each day just enjoying them, because we don’t know what will happen. But life is one big tantrum. We don’t know what we want. Life has been too good to most of us. Instead of cookies, we have a variety of snacks that are at a seconds grasp from our fingertips. Instead of a few ugly girls, or a few acne ridden boys, we have the images of Hollywood, and Cosmo Magazine to tell us we deserve whatever we desire.

Well, I didn’t desire anything too great. I didn’t even think that I was in control. But now I understand that all I wanted was control. Control of my life, and control of my future. I wanted everything possibly imaginable. And I still do. But each day that goes by, I find it harder and harder to obtain the things I really want. I’m starting to give up. I’m starting to find out that it’s much easier being there for someone else, than it is for people to be there for me. I’m finding that it’s easier to accept people’s flaws and to disregard any hurtful thing that someone may inflict on me, as being something that involved a bad episode for that specific person. People aren’t real with me like I’m real with them. I give my all, and rarely do I ever hold back. If I can find some grounds on which I can just be with someone and relate, I let them know anything that they would ever want to know.

But people don’t do this to me. I would travel until I’d die. I’d walk across deserts and swim across oceans that would kill me within hours. I’d try as hard as I could, never giving up, never stopping until I got what I obtained. But few people would do this, because they have their control. They have either ignorance, a lack of caring, or simply have what they desire. It can be a mixture of the three even. But I’m tired of feeling my way around for objects that aren’t hurtful. I’ve found the things that hurt me enough. I’ve found the things that interest me. And I’ll give up for now on everything. I’ll write words that make no sense. I’ll try to express the most complex of any feeling I ever felt. And when no one understands, and one the one person that I want to say “I love you Anders” doesn’t say that. When no one talks and no one listens, when everyone lives as if living is just a given, when the shoreline beckons me to swim, and the dry deserts lend me their landscape, right then, I’ll simply assume this one sentence. I have obtained control over everything and everyone, and it’s all there waiting being obedient, simply for me, yes simply for me.