American Dream

As you grow, from child to adult

You’re taught the ideal

It’s broadcast through the media

It’s preached with great appeal

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Before long the message becomes your own

You sell yourself on it because it’s all you’ve known

The pattern is there, society set the template

Rung by rung you climb the ladder

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College, job, career…

Spending time with friends

Repeating the same stories over beer

Marriage arrives as a means to an end

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Buy the house you can’t afford

White picket fence with kids in the yard

Annoying neighbors as far as the eye can see

You may not want it, but you asked for it: The American Dream

Suburban Angst

Smoke rises from the grilling domestic symbolism

As rockwellian images frolic in the yard below

Playfully ignorant in the summer sun

Of the metaphysical existence of the modern man

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Quelling over one's purpose and plan

Slices of potential melt over the now

Heat rises and stifles thoughts

Where is your youthful rebellion?

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Acknowledgement bores itself

From the fence not tall enough

Escape is found in the call

Dourly you are kitchen bound

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Existence asks you to pass the ketchup

Purpose is making a mess of dinner

Potential regales in preteen menagerie

Feeling ethereal and connected to it all

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The sun sets and hot is the wind

Kids shuffle off to while the hours before bed

Wife joins you in staring upon this mess

Of suburban angst that has fallen again

K.Keller – ‘10

The Soul Mate Dilemma

You know it when it happens, and if you've never experienced, it will sound like so much hyperbole. You meet that one person, and when you do, things just start lining up; your mind and heart finally feel like everything is in sync. Everything just feels right, like destiny's hand is on both of your shoulders, guiding you two closer together until like atoms, you're drawn inexplicably together to become one molecule. It all just fits together and you can't fathom that it couldn't be any other way. Going beyond mere physical attraction, you see something in the other's face, the little expressions, smiles, anger, sadness; it all seems unique and special.

Some would rush to call it love, but love doesn't contain the feelings you have when you've met that certain person that just seems to complete you in every way. It comes from a higher plane, like you're connected to something beyond our senses of perception. Love is a part of it, but you can love someone without it being your soul mate. You can love someone and it can feel warm and caring, but it never feels as connected as when you meet that one.

The dilemma though faced by those that find their soul mates is the inevitable cadre of consequences that the universe inevitable puts in your path, and generally the destruction that follows. It's the dilemma of matter and ant-matter coming together. It's natural, it's beyond what we can perceive in this universe, and the coming together of these two universal particles is their immediate and cataclysmic destruction.

To know your soul mate is to live with the reality that life will never be the same after meeting that person. To be with that person, one will travel the ends of the earth, risk life and death, and will be willing to let go of everything that was their universe. You feel like if the two of you are together, everything will work out... everything will be right.

Nature is not without its sense of cruel irony. No one will warn you that you will be significantly altered by the meeting, that your physical and mental state will never be the same. And because you can't believe that it could ever end once you're with that person, you will never see the emptiness that lies before you when you two are no more. Love will never taste as sweet, loneliness will be the universe for you, and hate and contempt will follow you because of the unfairness that life will deal you.

A star that burns twice as bright, burns out twice as fast, and this will be your existence. The empty core that remains collapses upon itself, and life will blur around in a haze. The real dilemma of this finding of your soul mate is that after the star has burned, and life has found a way to divide you, you will still be left to live on. You of course have the option that Romeo and Juliet chose, but there is always tomorrow, and there is always the memory of what was once the greatest thing you have ever known.

You will have to choose to remember the past, but not live there. Take what was good and use it to move on. You will find love, but it will never be what you knew. Finding a soul mate for most is a never in a lifetime experience, and for the lucky, unfortunate that find theirs, there is a short time to realize it. They will be forever haunted by its glorious perfection, and shocked by its brevity. It's inevitable, and you will refuse to see it until it is long over. You will be tempted to tell others who find it to be forewarned, but you will know better. You know they won't hear... they've passed that event horizon and until the inevitable destruction comes, all you can do is watch and hope they survive to be able to remember what was once was.

The soul mate dilemma is in knowing and not being able to do a damn thing about it.

Socially Inept: The Reality Of Facebook

To join or not to join, that is the question. Whether to join that cacophony of random useless factoids, or confirm in truth that no one really cares what you think.

For me, to join wasn't a choice. My wife, who finds such sites to be entertaining, signed me up under her email. Sure, it was neat at first to have people I barely remember from high school suddenly ask to be my friend. But then it happened, as I'm sure it happens to all closet extroverts who join, hoping that someone will notice them. That moment when no one and I mean no one responds to your post. It's like waiting for that girl or guy to call you, but they never do. Your Facebook page continuing to scroll on by with the exchange of others mocking your apparent lack of interestingness...

You seethe with anger as you read that stream of life passing you by, and look at what's being written. There's nothing unique, there's nothing profound about what these people are writing, but they are getting responses while your post floats on down that river of text out to the infinium of the sea, and the cold hard reality of it hits you:

No One Likes You. If no one likes you, then there will be no one who finds what you have to say interesting. You've successfully found another social circle you can't be apart of, but with the added benefit of it being global, for all to see.

This was my dilemma as I saw the rather innocuous postings of my wife come up teeming with responses while mine floated on by. No one really cared to know what I thought, or what I was doing on vacation. For all my wife's claims of being unpopular in high school, I had visual proof of who was more so.

My time on Facebook ended as it began, with my wife. I was about to post about having the ultimate bonding experience with a spouse outside of coitus: getting a pedicure together when my wife looked over my shoulder and ranted, "That's too long. I hate it when people go on about stuff."

I looked at it. It didn't seem too long, in fact I was looking at another post right below where I was about to join the stream, and it was just as long. People had commented on it... And In truth, it was just as long as the post my wife had done. Then it hit me.

Too Long, too short, or just right, no one's gonna care that you got a pedicure with your wife anyway. And that was the reality of Facebook for me. What started off as something I didn't want to do, but had turned into something I was trying in an effort to become closer to my wife's world had come back full circle. The final realization in that being myself, no one cared. I was just as unhip and unpopular as I had been in high school.

I found my way to the deactivate account button. Facebook, acting like that one person who pleads with you, “Come on… don’t go… don’t be like that… there are people here who still want to know you…”, eventually relented after I convinced it that being ignored in cyberspace is just as bad as being ignored in reality. Somewhat mournfully, I disconnected from that world and re-entered the world where I'm accepted: mine. The world where I can be myself, type as long as I damn well feel like it without breaking the precious etiquette of the socially accepted. Back to the world that always accepted me for me. It’s a lonely world, but it’s one that’s always been there for me.

My wife wondered a couple weeks ago why a friend of hers wouldn't want to be stay on Facebook? My question to my wife would be: Why would anybody want to be anywhere where they didn't feel accepted and not a part of? Where visually they can watch people they know have lives without them, and worse, when they do try to contribute, nothing happens, no one responds. For people who found it hard to be socially accepted in life to join Facebook, it's like having a mirror held up to you, but this time, it isn't the physical appearance driving people away:

It's just you...