Who Are You?
The Who released this song in 1978 and how appropriate because that was the decade of my coming of age. I had a brief encounter of the good kind today and was reminded that who I am right now is not really who I ought to be. I had this feeling before, the same person caused it, and today I had it in spades.
I used to be a maverick, a renegade, a rogue player hearing the beat of a different drum but I moved to California and everything went awry. I needed to make money to afford to live in “paradise” – something I had never contemplated in earnest before – so I gradually started letting go of my dream to be a fiction writer – then I needed to buy a house because I was about to be expelled from my apartment due to dot.com greed – so I more firmly embraced “the” way that was being offered to me – and even when I woke and felt the earth being shoveled on my premature grave (read: I was in Marin County), I ran home as fast as I could and lo and behold, I was met by a changed world – a world underwater – my new reality had a steep new price tag – so stay the course I did – I couldn’t escape even here in the City that Care Forgot – despite obstacles – despite desire – despite the inside me that still was at war with the outside me.
Who am I?