The guts of the Mind Fish

Many people ask me why I have not written anything since August.  I fumble and excuse with poorly rehearsed lines, confusing myself as to why my spool of memories has failed.  With a familiar start I realise almost four months have passed since I made the decision to leave Guatemala and re-enter the western world.  So many philosophies, so many moments, unrecorded.  They dance underneath my eyelids, taunting me with half-formed answers.  I reach to grab them and my fingers close over empty air, the moment vanquished.

The truth is, every time I sit down to write, a Mind Fisherman, high up in the clouds, stabs his hook through my skull and pulls, hard, until I find myself floating several feet above the ground and unable to reach the keyboard.  There I stay, sometimes flailing, sometimes still, waiting for the fisherman to either pull me up for inspection or release me back into the wild. 

For months, I have been the subject of examination by those above, who comb my brainwaves for meaty morsels, judge me on the beauty and fleshiness of my thoughts, while I stare at them with shiny circle eyes. 

After each encounter I am left confused and decompressed, with a hole in the head, leaking words in a stream of empty metaphor and overly descriptive expression. I am fit only for laughter or tears, or both, in a manic combination of emotion too strong to withhold.




But for now, I am free.  Finally I am able to finger those thoughts, squishing them and rolling them in search of meaning.

America... America was, well... not so bad, actually.

I enjoyed myself.  I made a lot of friends.  I'll probably go back.  But I'm not in a rush.

Most Americans are wonderful people.  They have travellers, just like the rest of the world.  Except this generation of travellers all have the same passport.

They don't seem to mind that every town looks the same.  The landscape is, as they say, awesome.

We went to some festivals unlike anything I've ever seen.  We drove around with a group of kids from Indiana.  We stayed high, high up in the mountains.  We ran along deserted beaches.  In three months, we stayed in just three hotels.  The rest of our beds were donated by the seemingly endless generosity of the locals.

America certainly is the country of superlatives.  Biggest.  Wildest.  Most Generic.  Craziest.  I saw a lot of crazy things, actually.  Naked people riding bicycles through the desert.  A greenhouse brimming with fresh marijuana.

San Francisco, the city that everyone raves on about, was mediocre.  A city, really.  A nice one, sure, but full of twitching meth-addicts and shiny-shoed fashion victims, alongside slow-walking tourists and over-priced chips.  I smiled blandly as person after person warned me of the horrific dangers of Mexico, and stared at the corner of Union Square where a German tourist was shot dead outside Macy's department store the month previously. 

I admired very much the hippy mentality of northern California.  There, amidst stunning mountain backdrops and small, colonial towns, a subculture has become a monoculture and everyone buys organic.  The people are unbelievably jovial, love yoga and religiously re-fill their shampoo bottles at the corner store.

But despite the similar vital statistics, I did not fit in, even there. Everywhere I went, I found ego to be too huge a part of life.  People seemed obsessed with labelling themselves.

There, you do not just like yoga, you are 'a yogi'.  You are not just an independent, free-spirited woman. You are A Goddess.  You cannot say, "I like to paint" without someone replying, "Ahh, so you are An Artist".  And everyone asks you what your star sign is, and nods knowingly when you reply.  Even if you lie.

To be honest, harsh though it sounds, I just got bored of people talking about themselves.  Perhaps it was just the people I met.  Ironic really, for me to write this in a blog of My Take On Life.  But at least I see the satire.

Despite this, I loved almost everyone that I met.  Some of them were incredibly inspiring.  Take Jay - the man who picked us up as hitch-hikers on the road from Yosemite. He had just finished scattering his wife's ashes to the wind.  I sat down in the front seat of the car and promptly broke the urn.  For some reason this meant something to him and he drove us six hours west to Santa Cruz and gave us a bed for the night.

He talked of his struggle to make his life his own since his wife's sudden death a year previously.  He'd started by getting up at 4am every morning.  He had pictures of a year's worth of sunrises, seen from the beach.  The light from these suns shone from his eyes as he talked.  Then he made a vow to rid himself of 'two square inches of surplus stuff' per day, in order to recover his house and his mind from a dead person's weight.  I understood every nuance.

I cooked him chickpea tagine and told him stories, and watched his face animate in front of me.  He later told me he'd started to cook again for the first time since she died.  He dropped us off in San Francisco with two new rollmats (a rather large 'two inches' he cheerfully cried), sheets hemmed by his wife, and forty bucks to buy myself a jacket.  We were left to hitch on Golden Gate Bridge, hidden by the mist and the bewilderment of a man who gave everything just for love.

Now I find myself in England.  It was, as always, almost an accident.  A split-second decision.  By coincidence or design, I can't be sure, but I arrived home exactly a year after I first left.

I've a ticket booked back for January.  I have, dare I say it, A Plan.  But of that, I will refrain from writing.  That is a morsel best conserved for me.  I currently have both feet firmly on the ground, fingers rooted to the keyboard, and mind free from molestation.  I spill my guts voluntarily, this time.