Future Event Anxiety
When I was on my way to go live in San Francisco I stopped to visit my Grandparents in Weatherford Texas. I stayed for about a week. I was so anxious to get on my way that I thought I might just fucking spontaneously combust. Purgatory is a hell of a place to be, 'specially for a whole week. You know that feeling when you have closed the door on one chapter of life and you have yet to darken the door of the next chapter. Its torture really.
So there I was chillin in Weatherford for about five days. I wanted to get in a good visit cause I wasn't sure when I would be back that way. I was bored and anxious and absolutely plagued by my imagination running wild about the possibilities and opportunities that I would find in SF. The thing about the future is that you can NEVER, ever actually conjure up an image in your head that has anything to with how things are actually going to turn out. No matter how hard you think and envision and fantasize about the sights, smells and events of the future you will NEVER, ever hit the nail on the head. And we know this, but yet we all still spend precious brain power on imagining the future. Its part of the horror and singularity of the human condition. Ain't nuthin' else like it.
So I was there in Weatherford and I was beset by this condition of 'future event anxiety' and so I went to the library one day to take my mind off things. Weatherford ain't the most cosmopolitan of bergs but its not the worst podunk shithole either. The library is modest and maybe a little outdated. Case in point ~ I found a book there about San Francisco, a picture book about San Francisco. I had intended to take my mind of the problem at hand but when I started thumbing through the card catalogue thinking about a topic I still could only think of my destination and my subsequent destiny. The book was printed in the early seventies. It had lots of pictures of lots of things that were still in essence San Francisco. But the pictures were old and it as it turns out a lot of things had changed in thirty years in SF. That book gave me a sense of a simpler time in SF and when I got there I found that for the most part those things and that time had been pooped on and paved over.
I wish I could control my mind enough to refrain from thinking too hard about the future. I think that is part of the serenity of living in the now. I'm leaving work and going to the gym in about half an hour. No matter how hard I try I have images of what that is going to be like and inevitably those images will be different from how things will actually play out.
fascination
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