ROOTS, BLOODY ROOTS.

1. ROOTS AND SHIT

I decided to go back to my ‘homelands’ to find my roots and shit.
I needed to find my roots and shit because my leaves and shoots were dying,
turning brown and wilting at the top from some unknown disease.
My roots weren’t even in the ground to begin with.
I had been growing hydroponically my whole life, but now all the water had dried up and my roots lay exposed to the polluted air.
An idiotic tumbleweed rolling across the infinite desert towards a mirage of an oasis, all the while burning up in the sun.
I needed some soil.
I needed to put an end this ongoing identity crisis named ‘Dick Moon’ so I could get on with my life and die eventually, so I could get on with my death and live eventually.
I needed to return back to my ‘homelands’ to try and work it out. Come to some kind of ‘conclusion’ that I doubted I existed, some kind of context for the ‘aimless drifting in no particular direction’ that had defined ‘my life’ up and until that moment.
It was the typical first generation immigrant bullshit:
I wasn’t from where I was born and raised, but I wasn’t from where my parent’s were
from either.
Boohoohoo.
So where was I really from? Who was I? Who really gave a shit? Did it even matter?
These clichéd questions crowded my mind like the sperm dying inside my balls.
What did they call it again?
‘Third culture kids’ or some shit.
Some umbrella term for the millions of people not from anywhere they were supposed to be, wandering the earth, constantly asking themselves where they were from, what it meant, whether it even mattered and boring the shit out of anyone who listened to them.
Dunno mate.
All I did know was that god willing, soon us ‘third culture kids’ would outnumber all the ‘first and second culture kids’ who were from where they were supposed to be from, and with strong leadership and unwavering belief, we could overthrow them and take over the world.
My plan would be to geographically displace all these ‘first and second culture kids’ so they would soon be like us. I would abduct American children from New York and airdrop them into the wilderness of the Serengeti plans to be raised by pygmies. I would abduct the pygmy children from the Serengeti plains and airdrop them into the financial district of Zurich, Switzerland to be raised by wealthy stockbrokers. I would abduct children from Zurich and airdrop them into the small coastal fishing communities of Polynesia to be raised by whoever the hell lived there. Polynesian fisherman or some shit.
And so on and so on.
Soon, the world would be full of people too confused about who they were to fight with each other, except for the many people inside of each of themselves, competing for dominance.
There would be no more time for war, everyone would be too busy, in therapy.

I bought a plane ticket ‘home’ and went on my merry way.
My parent’s weren’t too pleased about it.
They had spent the greater part of their lives, escaping the economically suffocating conditions of their ‘homelands’ to provide for me the ‘better’ life in a ‘better’ country and now to them it seemed like I was rejecting that.
They had returned to their ‘homelands’ only once since illegally immigrating to ‘Ostraya’ back in 1975.
They spent 5 stressful days of a planned two week stay there, before returning early. Going back ‘home’ had dredged up a lot of old, unpleasant memories and they weren’t too pleased about it. Too much had changed since they were young and the picture they had in their mind of what it had been like in the past radically clashed with what it was like in the present: An old, sleepy town nestled in the foothills of the Himalayas, now slowly being ‘raped’ by modernity.
Also, mum passed out and had a fit from eating too much of the local pickled chilli.
Also, like myself and many others, sometimes you just hate where you grew up.
It contained too many goddamn memories and anchor points for versions of yourself you wanted dead and buried.
Which was precisely why I was leaving ‘Ostraya’.
Which was precisely why they hated me going back to the ‘homelands’ for an unknown period of time.
To them it seemed like I was spitting in the face of everything they had worked hard for. They had worked very, very, very hard all their lives to escape the poverty of growing up in a developing country, to have the luxury of enjoying the empty materialism, suffocating comfort and unfocused malaise of Western middle class life, often mistaken for the lifestyle channel they were watching on TV.
It was a very inspiring human interest story if you thought about it.
This one time I had seen a very inspiring human interest story on the news about some poor orphan who grew up in some crime-ridden third world ghetto and through sheer tenacity and willpower, grew up to be a rich multi-millionaire business owner somewhere in the west.
Then one day while sitting in his office, he blew his brains out with a very expensive gun.
There is a lesson buried in this tale somewhere, hiding amongst all the shards of skullbone and the brain pulp and the canned laughter, but I can’t be bothered trying and find it.
I guess he only won half the battle is what I’m saying.
Perhaps if he’d gone back to his roots he wouldn’t of pruned his leaves prematurely.
But one can only speculate.
I didn’t know the guy and now I never would.