Inwardly I have noticed, rather, I have known that at this time in my life I feel like a farmer’s silo burdened with the riches of harvest; however, there is no market for what lies within, the heavy volume of months of growth and ripeness. It is as if there is no market for the wheat that can turn into flour and bread. I have scanned sites for volunteers here in Henderson to no avail. The work is unappealing to me or simply does not make my bones knit enough to go out and apply. Picking out what to volunteer for is like applying for the right job. I’m not into working in hospices, ladling soup, or faxing flyers. It has to have some meaning for me. I check out the suspicious ads on Craigslist for jobs in education which are mostly tutorial which I find as dull as I ever did when I was teaching. I scan writing/editing jobs only to find the ridiculous sums they pay for “writers” or those who think they are writers or those who make it difficult for other writers by selling their souls for measly amounts. And so it goes for other categories — non-profit organizations, etc.
It may be me but my sense of Henderson and its environs here in Nevada is that it is exclusionary. One apparently has to join a group or organization, strive to know everyone and when that has occurred you may then be able to break into another group and so on. It is not a welcoming situation and goes far to explain what I feel is a spaced out “community” whose major task is creating anomie. “The Lonely Crowd” reigns here.The Strip is not Las Vegas; Henderson and other communities are really towns one might pass through on the great Plains, a gas station, the Elks lodge, the John Deere outlet and Sears. It is a blue collar state with all the associations, good and bad, one may have of that — I am underwhelmed personally. I associate to the class warfare between Richard Dreyfus, scientist, and Robert Shaw, fisherman in “Jaws.” The values are so different. I had the dubious distinction of being in a local gym and asking to change Beck on Fox News to CNN and greeted with dissent, for here was the evangelical demigod spewing his anti-Semitic and apochryphal shit across the airwaves. I would die emotionally, psychologically, mentally if I had to teach students in Iowa. Yet, Henderson , one of the better sexurbs of Vegas, is not all that bad, but nauseating enough. My next door neighbor, a nice guy, love that term, can only speak of his ambitious needs to better himself at work and nothing much more than that — books, no, future pension yes, ideas no, income next year and so on. I can only listen and mentally remove myself from his chatter.
Imagine poor Todd Palin sleeping next to lithe, cheery and gushing Sarah late at night and one may get a taste of what I consider hell on earth.
I am retired, but not retired, if you get my drift, for that is a conditioning given to us by an aimless society bereft of sanity and sense. I am still trying to make my way in a crazed world amid a crazed culture, seeking, perhaps that is the right word, to make some shape or configure some form that will give me something to do, to be, to become aware as I move to the cliff of despond. In me dwells an amorphous feeling, mostly realized in mind, of wanting to give of what I have learned all these years. With Jane I give all I can academically, therapeutically, psychologically, lovingly to someone who is accepting and receptive to my ravings sane and scholarly if that. As Jane knows so well, if you are unsuccessful in this society it causes shame, one feels less, a calvinistic cloud of diminishment enshrouds you. The rugged individualism of capitalism presses you down as a thumbtack driven into cork for your “failure” to amount to anything. You are considered so little, so less if you do not brandish yourself as a product, a thing, if you don’t market yourself, just another tendril of a Dickens-like industrialization. The striving and striven aspect of capitalism is like an immense state augur just boring into your skull all the time, enforcing that you are guilty for your state of being, that you are poor because you are poor of spirit. Systems driving systems driving systems and very few of us are awake or aware of this constant pounding. Watch “The Elephant Man” and listen to the soundtrack that rumbles and roars throughout the film, the unceasing pounding and beating which is the very sound of the industrial revolution, that endlessly horrific event.
So I struggle, little gnat that I am, on this speck of nothingness in orbit about a third-rate star, a total irrelevancy trying give myself some meaning existentially, for there is none otherwise. To believe in religion is to run from the facts, like denying the moon is not in the night sky. To face one’s own irrelevancy is to face the denial of death, our daily bread. I seek to volunteer to help me, not solely the other. To give is a selfish act that hurts no one, for it brings one into awareness, the only thing that really matters for this dumb, brutish species.
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