The Great Escape

Every summer it comes, bears down on me like a juiced up bouncer during a fight, grabs me by the throat with thick forearms and shakes me to and fro until my back aches and my neck snaps.

Last summer, Morocco was to be my great escape, an infinite trip for as long as I could afford tp a sandy, danerous oasis in a world that has been to safe for too long. Unfortunately, no one shared my zeal to travel the Dark Continent, and that plan was shelved; the money wasted on nameless nights in Irish pubs across Northern New Jersey.

The winter snows can muffle my spirit for only so long, however the heat of the sun again signals something in me to demand escape from this penitentiary that my I live in. Knowing that in a span of two months, my life will be vastly different, upended completely by a massive job search that I have undertaken in order to free myself from the eighty pound forklift chains that hold me to my shit job, to that shit life that I have forseen for myself. This time, however, it is different, and the very real possiblity of doing some freelance writing has given me something I haven't had in ages: hope.

There were dark days when I'd imagine that I would fail, and that I would be trampled into mediocrity by the natural course of life. I would wear workboots for the rest of my days, and would one day end up a blithering drunken old man who never realized, much less lived up to, my potential. I would be old and tough and bitter, cursing my own innate laziness that caused me to lead such a blackened life. My children would never forgive me for my bitterness.

But that is not to be. With every passing day, I am fanning the fire that this hope has given to me, searching for long hours on end for a job where I can finally write instead of searching for internet porn. For years I have held on tightly to the mentality of a type of reverse discrimiation, an absolute and unequicoval disdain for anything approaching a white collar job. That hasn't entirely died- I will forever be on the side of the worker, the toiler, and soldier, and the Union man. However, I have finally realized that the path they tread is not to be mine, and the pride they carry in their weathered, broken hands is not a pride that I can indulge in. My course is a different one, and the power that I have with the pen is something that is rarely replicated, and so I must use it, or be damned.

It is not my duty to this world to heave lumber upon my shoulders on a dusty contstuction site, or to dwell in a dimly lit factory floor putting doors on cars. No, my calling lies in the tight winding allyways of Marrakesh, in a waterside bar in Venice, or on a mountaintop in Wyoming, at the foot of the Sphinx in the great Egyptian desert. It lies in all the spectacular places that I have yet to visit, all the events I have yet to witness, and all the strokes of the pen that I have yet to make. I will be as at home in Rome as I would be in Paterson, and the current of history will carry me to where I need to be.

When I am old, I will sit in a leather bound chair behind a great fat desk like Winfield Scott, and I will look out over the harbor of either New York City or Boston at the glowering lights of a glorious city, and I will look at my hands, those scarred, cigarette burned hunks of flesh, and I will laugh and say, "How lazy I was in my first 23 years! But what I life I led in the last 50 to make it all worth it!

Though I will rave and burn at the close of day when I know for a fact that there will be no final encore, I will have left an indelible mark on this world, and I will close my eyes and die a happy man, and my words will go beyond me and be read for a millenium, and people will know my name, as if it was shot from a brass cannon and exploded across the skies in a great final shout that grabbed everyone's attention and at the same time blinded them.