Last email to the fam

Hi kids, g-kids, gg-kids, and g^n-kids,

I’ve cut my trip to Ecuador short. I was trekking through the Vilcabamba valley and I thought “This is gorgeous” and then I thought “I’ve been here before.”

Turns out I’ve been there twice before. Had to look it up, though. Same thing happened in the Caucasus a few months ago.

You know how I love to travel. And I have travelled. I’ve hit every spot a couple of times at least, mostly it seems because they keep being pushed out of mind, including four trips to the moon (which is just a mall in space unless you work there. G^n’s — don’t bother spending more than a day on it. Get a suit and go hop around outside, ignore everything else).

My bucket list, you know how long that is, has been done and redone to death. So I’m pulling the plug on myself.

Yeah, I’m being selfish, but I’m bored. No, boredom isn’t the right word. It’s more a collapse of expectations. I have none.

I don’t expect I will go somewhere new. I don’t expect I will read a book that is unlike any other book I have read, or see a movie, or play a game unlike the countless ones that have come before. Worse, I don’t expect I will hear music that is not just a variation on music I’ve heard before.

That’s the gist of it — my life has diminished from one of variety to one of mere variation. Everything has become a remix and the components aren’t changing. Even the combinations of those components are repetitious.

I expect that if aliens were to land tomorrow they would be just as boring as we are, playing out the same love, fear, hope and power games, writing the same kind of songs and the same kind of poems, making the same kind of movies and the same kind of amusements.

And I don’t want to go see their cliffs or their mountains or their wildlife. It sounds curmudgeonly, but nature has its own components and its own forms, and after a while it just becomes stamp collecting or train-spotting, both of which have always struck me as compulsive rather than celebratory habits.

The compulsive pursuit of variation is not a life for me. That’s a program, a search algorithm. And, as you know, every program, no matter how complex, can be expressed in gears and axles and cams. To be alive yet to live as a mechanical assemblage is not living, it is enduring.

I’ve reached the end of my organic, emotional endurance. Life has become re-runs and re-hashes. Like a media series that has lost heart and is running on commerce, so the world has become to me.

So I’m pulling the plug. I love you all, and I love the times and places we shared, but I will remember none of it and none of you.

This body, this brain, this exquisite instrument of experience, deserves, even needs, the thrills of music and love and discovery, of family and disappointment and heartache, of awe at the universe and char-grilled meat.

I’m over all that, but the larval me, who I cannot remember but I know he had great taste in music, he will appreciate it all and so deserves to have it in my stead, and I, the curmudgeon he became, is getting out of his way.

Tomorrow at 10 I’m being stripped back to the adolescent bedrock. It is not death, but it is, and curmudgeons like me deserve it and look forward to it.

Live it up,

(G^n)-Pa

Who wrote this?

I’m a Sydney Copywriter who occasionally tweets. When I’m not sharing practical tips, like the best short form writing tool ever, I like to pen the occasional rant, and convert Brian Eno tracks into text.