by lovelaurie
I am drowning in the excess of many men yet starving for the attention of one. Why is it that the one we cannot have feels like the only man that matters? I am egoically propelled on the hamster wheel of consumption yet longing for the one who can throw a wrench in the cog. STOP. This jolt would stop my path of destruction. I am walking among the land of excess: society wants more, I want more, and everyone wants more. More than what we have.
In this state of mind, I am tired. I am tired of wanting more. I am tired of waiting for someone . I am tired of wanting someone to want me. I am frustrated and find myself staring off in the distance in tears wanting to tell society to FUCK OFF. I haul my ass through this dull and placid city wanting to see more yet always disappointed in the outcome. Is it just me?
Enjoy your writings Laurie, you paint pictures with your words.
A quote that comes to mind is one by C.S Lewis:
“We use a most unfortunate idiom when we say, of a lustful man prowling the streets, that he “wants a woman.” Strictly speaking, a woman is just what he does not want. He wants a pleasure for which a woman happens to be the necessary piece of apparatus. How much he cares about the woman as such may be gauged by his attitude to her five minutes after fruition (one does not keep the carton after one has smoked the cigarettes). Now Eros makes a man really want, not a woman, but one particular woman. In some mysterious but quite indisputable fashion the lover desires the Beloved herself, not the pleasure she can give. No lover in the world ever sought the embraces of the woman he loved as the result of a calculation, however unconscious, that they would be more pleasurable than those of any other woman.”
In regards to your feelings of Vancouver being a “dull and placid city”, you are not alone. In fact, Vancouver has been branded as one of the loneliest cities in North America. I attribute this to a few things; Vancouver has no history and everyone is from somewhere else. There is nothing that specifically grounds people or unites them.
Recently, I’ve taken on a project with a some other Vancouverites who feel the same way. A documentary is being made on “The Lonely City” and we are beginning to brainstorm “solutions’. While it is a shame that it requires effort, this social dynamic is interesting. Paris does not have this problem because they have a history, they just know who they are. Perhaps Vancouver has an identity issue and as such we cannot relate to one another…
yes, it is the pleasures that I seek not neccessariliy the tool that will get me “there” so to speak. Many others and my friends talk about this idea and notion of enlightenment through sex, David Dieda calls it Fucking to open to god (or something like that) and frankly I like the idea it makes being a lover mystical for a higher cause. You mentioned Ero’s because I think it was she who could never look at her lover, she was imagining a divine lover. She waited and waited for him, she waited to be decieved. I could be mixing up my godesses! Nonetheless interesting aspect of why Vancouver is so lonely. That and no culture. People are not interested in other people. I was sick to my stomach yesterday after listening Martin Luther King speeches and seeing an enslaught of commerical love on ig and fb. MLK spoke about a “uncondition love for all man for the survival of mankind” and a lack there of is a what he calls a “spritual death”.
Do you believe that we can not relate to one another? Or do we lack the confidance to be vulnerable with other people? Vulnerable to expressing what we like and don’t like. Vulnerablities to commonness- we are essentially human beings experiencing the same experiences, yet somehow think our experience is different and better than the person behind us at starbucks. oh how I ramble.
Let me know when the documentary is ready would love to see it.
Regards,
Laurie