Been feeling trapped? I have...

Over the past four months, I have been deadlocked in complacency. I have been locked in a set pattern of work (when I was employed), school, homework, movies, and shitty food that has remained unbroken until fairly recently. I was sick for the better part of October and the time I spent recuperating gave me a chance to analyze my behavior. I feel a big part of why I have been as unproductive as I have is due to my environment.

It all comes down to whom I associate with on a daily basis and how that is done. My roommate is not an anarchist, is not into DIY, and in a lot of ways is very much a normal member of society, except that he claims vegan straight edge and listens to hardcore-not that any of that is outside society. This also true of many of the people I interact with on a regular basis, except that some are anarchist but not vegan, or straight edge but not anarchists, vegan but not straight edge, etc (not that I desire homogeneity by requiring everyone to act as I do). By the way, none of this is intended to be shit talk on these folks, because they are genuinely great people with a lot to offer. I just cannot stand feeling isolated while I am surrounded. It is too hard to resist the current of a fixed routine especially with the distraction of school. Instead of coming home from class and exploring, creating, or communicating, I emulate the same behaviors my roommate and peers do. As a result, I sit at a computer logged into myspace, I watch movies, I eat hella processed food, and I don't have dialogue with those I share my living space with. And this is frighteningly easy to do.

Often when I come home from school, I am fatigued; I have spent the better part of a day investing my emotions, attention, and thoughts into subjects that often mean jack shit to me. There are few avenues for discussion in my classes, my peers are often unreceptive to dialogue outside the classroom, and lectures almost always fail to hold my attention. I do my best to stay engaged, and when that fails, remove myself. Despite this, I have developed a comfort zone founded on the very things that disgust me. This is why I come home and fail to challenge this pattern. It is simply inconvenient not to.

Luckily, inconvenience has hit me. I recently made the decision to move out of my current apartment and back into the folks' basement for a bit in order to get my shit together (in so many ways). I feel that living alone will remove the influence of others locked into to the pattern I wish to escape and allow me to redevelop the rituals of living I enjoy-reading, hiking, running, writing, talking. Once I relearn to do these things on a regular basis, I will likely seek others to live with, others who share some of my desires in life and do similar things.

In this respect, there have been quite a few people and groups in my life these past few weeks that have pushed me out of my comfort zone. I joined my university's sustainability group which luckily is composed of some rad folks. While we do not all share the same lifestyle or the same dreams, we do all come from the same foundation. We all desire to live in world were humans are connected to and contribute to the intricate weaving of life rather than tear threads out of the fabric and lay them in parallel rows. Our main focus, prior to the approaching seasonal change in weather, has been in creating a network of campus gardens. It is our hope that these gardens will not just provide students with locally grown food, but also foster a desire to form a more direct connection with the land we live in. As we put the garden beds down for the winter, we are transferring our energy to the creation of a zine that will introduce our fellow students to the ideas behind sustainability (and not so much in the guise of the capitalist co-option of this term). Even though most people who read it will likely fail to gain anything beyond something new to talk about over beer pong, there will be a few who will be turned on to a new world. More importantly, it will assert an opposing opinion to that which pervades a campus that is hella bro and hipster if you catch my drift. In this sense, it should be a good piece of casual sedition.

Another recent occurrence in my life which further serves to push me out of my comfort zone is the opportunity I have recently had to help comfort some of my closest friends in a way hitherto unneeded. As a result, I have had a chance to see my friends act in ways that are not normal to their behavior and reveal things that were previously unspoken. As a result, I too have acted in a way uncharacteristic to our relationship. Ultimately this has made for a closer, deeper bond. To see that I can provide support to those who reach out is a huge comfort for me. I cannot count the times I reached and had no one reaching back, and I have also been the one that turns the other way. Now I can help and it feels good.

Finally, I have met some new people who are outside my normal circle of friends who encourage me to break out of that comfort zone and enable me to interact in new ways despite the fact that I remain in my old environment. Getting closer to these people has also exposed me to new ideas, and because they are outside of the vegan, punk, straight edge, and anarchist circles I move in, free of the the tension that arises in these collective masses. Yet, they retain the commonality that attracts me to these groups, so I do not feel an absence of anything. I have also recently united with several friends from my past. These were people I once was close with, but strayed away from as I got more and more into the things I am into now. Despite the fact that myself and these people do not have a similar outlook on life, there is still a huge emotional connection. We can relate as though it were a few days as opposed to a few years that had elapsed since we were last together. This is a kind of permanence-or at least consistency-that has always been absent in my life. Now that I have it, I have no intention of letting it go.

All in all, I want to remain connected with those I love and those I share affinity with, but I do not want to have to sacrifice myself to do this. There are over 6 billion fucking people on this planet-I am bound to be able to relate to at least a few of those beings. Whether it means abandoning a lifestyle, a person, or a group, we should not let ourselves be trapped by a false sense of comfort. This is not to say that familiarity or patterns should be abandoned. They should not become principles or boundaries as seen in the repetition of life within a comfort zone. Instead, they should be manifested as ceremonies such as one engages in a ritual expression of life. Let us affirm what we love about living and fight like fuck for it.

Its 2008. We need to be serious.

I have been a part of radical subculture for about 5 years now, and have been into radical social and environmental thinking for almost 10 years. I have gone from being an 11 granola kid reading Ed Abbey and deep ecology, to being a red flag waving punk kid, to my present state. A vegan straight edge anarchist (I choose to see this an action, not a category) looking to walk away from this debacle of a culture and build something new and healthy, beautiful and connected.

I am sickened by and weary of not just society, but also the subcultures that supposedly arise to subvert and challenge the dominant culture. These subcultures seem to be, despite all the ideology and strong, honest words, little more than reflections of the shit that we all vehemently claim to hate. I think our failure is not in our passion nor our desires but in our will. Our will to achieve something, be it total liberation from civilization or just in the creation of a healthy local music scene based on DIY ideas, seems often to get sidetracked in the name of power dynamics, social stratification, alienation, domination, and consumption. Momentum gets replaced with complacency, and somehow we fail to notice this as we spin a new record, chow down a soy burger, and attempt to be the loudest one screaming at the demo. We trade hollow slogans and images on shirts for the satisfaction of subversion and construction. We choose to vomit the words others have written than reveal our own histories. We watch movies where people go and conquer the bad guys, find true love, and overcome struggle instead of going out doing it for ourselves.

I have been just as caught up in this complacency as anyone else, if not more so. I have denied it, hidden from it, been tread on and possessed by it, but no more. I am tired of being a spectator to spectators, to getting caught up in the shit that kills my desire to live. I want to live, especially in a way that destroys all that counters that vital desire. I hope this blog can be a forum, one of many, to ignite not just my own involvement and my own attempt to break away from complacency, but those attempts by others as well. To me, radical community building, alternative subculture, and subversive thought can be successful but only when we will it to be so. Let not these things lose their effectiveness. It is time to grow teeth and become dangerous not just to the world we hate, but to the complacency resting inside all of us.