When I was a kid I had a nanny named Large Marge. She lived in a house made of clam buckets and good sturdy twine and she used to tell me about the kinds of fish that lived in the pond nearby, how if you boiled their eyeballs you could make a very nice stew, and how you could use the leftovers as glue just like elmers. Fish glue.I suspect she was just trying to get me to eat my fish sticks without complaining about the taste.
Later in life but still a long time ago I read about this fish that cannot survive without pressure. Bring it up to the surface and it turns into a gelatinous mess. If you think about that for a moment you realize that it's very survival and existence becomes the necessity of balancing deep and too deep. Imagine an entire sea and only that narrow strip of ocean to navigate.
Then I learned how common this is with fish, and it really explained a lot about the nature of jelly, surface tension, Press Secretaries and telemarketers.
Pressure keeps you short-term, pressure keeps you reactive. It is the largest of the modern day drug epidemics, a survival trait brought to a fevered and almost religious pitch. For instance, on the news yesterday I saw a mix of:
Price per barrel, oil company profits, copper doubling in price because of China's construction boom (white american fear tactic), Myspace prevents another columbine but the very name of both still strikes fear into the hearts of parents everywhere until it becomes "Myspace Columbine!", and nestled in there like so much afterthought and subdued shades of "oh, by the way..." was the story of the Pentagon going after the press for CIA leaks.
Which one of those is meant to incite? To distract? How can you tell the difference anymore? You fight for your constitutional right to free press, for the institution of unnamed sources, and all you get in the end is that same spot of ground you had in the first place and a sense of disbelief. But this is not a partisan rant, this is not political in nature. I don't go off on political climates and societal wrongs here (lucky you). It's a study in pressure on a larger scale, regardless of sides. This is the very definition of short-term thinking, of group survival. Pressure. Reaction. Testing those boundaries.
On a basic personal level, pressure is defined by how you are defined, the pressure to be accepted. Some people are born without this psychological pressure guage, relying instead on a more internal guage that is not connected to the rest. We call these people lucky bastards or Alaskans, depending. Regardless, chances are that if you're human you've felt pressure from the day you were born, and your entire life has been one long swim from one end of the depth spectrum to the next, one giant slippery sliding climb.
I was driving the other day down Riverdale Rd (which, if you've driven it, you know is actually the top secret location for about half of the black holes yet accounted for), and I heard that screeching brake sound and realized that the car was moving forward of it's own accord. Luckily it had nothing to do with me, and I actually just had my eyes crossed. Maybe I shouldn't be driving and listening to Al Greene at the same time.
As myspace blog metaphors go it's not a very good one, but it'll have to do. My point is that I'm a mish-mash person, a wanna-be Alaskan. I want the personal freedom and autonomy without the lonliness, the interactions without the filler, a very crystal clear existence. I would like to swim from one depth to the next without becoming goo. I not only want to have my cake and eat it too, I would like tea afterwards and to have a nice nap on the table, taking the kitchen sink with me when I go. It would be very nice to be able to see the tip of my nose whenever I'd like without crashing and to create a revolution so brilliant that it would be the last word in social constructs.
But maybe the pressure just serves to distract from the fact that given the wrong depth, ultimately, it's still just fishsticks.
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