I Still Want to Run Away

Well sprinkle my tits with glitter and call me a present, it sure is a splendid day to be sitting in a café writing nonsense. I should have ordered a hot tea. I ordered an iced tea, but it should have been a hot tea. Nothing will ever make up for the mistake I’ve made. My life is over. Everything is wrong. Put a bullet in me, nothing is worth anything anymore.

Good lord maybe I need a bullet to graze my leg so I can wake the hell up cause this tea sure as pits isn’t doing the trick. I’ve been oscillating between having a lot of energy and no energy lately which is weird and entirely uninteresting to anyone but myself.

“Hi I’d like a stray bullet, please!”

“Excuse me?”

“Green tea is fine.”

“Small or large?”

“9 millimeter.”

Imagine if you were so tired that you shot yourself in the leg just to get going in the morning. I wonder how many times you could shoot yourself in the same place before it became a significant health hazard. I’m not talking straight into the leg here, this is a graze situation… like a cow. Ultimate graze. Like you shoot yourself but you line it up so carefully that the bullet only penetrates half a millimeter across your skin.

I suppose if you shot yourself in the same exact place every time you would have to go deeper and deeper to continue making contact, but the question is: how many shots does it take to get to the center of your leg? Is it the same amount of licks it takes to get to the center of a tootsie pop? Is the pope gay? These are the questions we should be asking as a society.

Why do old people love reading the news so much? It seems to be their favorite thing to do. Take up space and read the news. Every old person in this café right now is taking up space and reading the news. Usually you don’t see old people in Austin but I got here at the crack of dawn and that’s when they like to come out to the café to take up space and read the news.

We should ban the news for a while. Imagine a world with no news. Imagine a world with no internet. Imagine a world constructed of entirely self-sustainable and peaceful communities living in accordance with nature. HAHAHAHAHAHA THAT’S STUPID JASON WHY WOULD ANYONE EVERY WANT THAT!?

Sometimes I wonder if our entire way of life is backwards and devoid of true meaning and purpose. I wonder less now, actually. I’m pretty sure of it. Sadly I don’t think it’s going to change. Maybe it will, but it will either take a really long time or something absolutely catastrophic will happen.

It’s a hard sell. It won’t work to try and convince the public to give up their entire way of life for something new. It’s hard to sell people on something major that they’ve never experienced. If you mention to someone “hey have you ever thought about giving up all your technology and comfort to go live in the woods with a self-sustaining community of 150 or so people?” they’re gonna be like “No. No I haven’t. And I’m not doing that. Why would I do that when I can just not do that?”

The point is, it’s really hard to sell someone on something they haven’t experienced. It’s like trying to get someone who has been obese their entire life to all of a sudden start eating healthy and exercising every day. Most people view it as a weight loss issue, but it’s not. That’s part of it, sure, but it’s not the point at all. A lot of overweight people don’t want to eat healthy and exercise because it’s a lot of effort to just “lose weight.”

But it’s not about losing weight. It’s about changing your entire sense of self and well-being. It’s about feeling good, having energy, maintaining a positive attitude, avoiding health issues that will make you sad and shitty, having clarity of mind… but if you’ve never experienced any of those things then you don’t know what you’re missing out on so why buy into it? If you’ve felt shitty your whole life then you don’t even know what it feels like to feel good.

We become what we’re comfortable with and if we become comfortable for too long then it becomes overwhelming to consider change. And that’s where we’re at as a society. We’re so comfortable being indoors, ordering food to be delivered, always being warm when we’re cold and cooled when we’re warm, so comfortable being comfortable that we don’t even consider trading some of our comfort for an actual life.

I know there’s something better out there but we fail to consider it because we don’t even know what we’re missing. I’ve seen it in their eyes, man. I’ve seen it in their eyes. If you ever watch a documentary or meet someone who lives in a tribe, they have life in their eyes. The way people talk about finding peace in the mountain or tranquility in the valley blows my mind every time. It’s like life slows down altogether when they speak. You can tell they’ve let go of the fear, the angst, the constant grind. It has evaporated like the morning dew straight into the sky and they can finally see through the fog.

I want to throw my computer against the wall and run away so bad right now.

Jason Brendel
Jason Brendel

Jason Brendel is an author, poet, and comedian living in Austin, Texas. Navigate the buttons below to follow him on social media, make a donation, or purchase his collection of laugh-out-loud poetry on Amazon.

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2 thoughts on “I Still Want to Run Away

  1. There was some kind of national holiday in the U.S. yesterday, one of those artificial ones, like “National Phone Day” or something. We should install a “National Running Away Day” instead. It’s more worthwhile, although that abbreviates to NRA Day, which might be misconstrued. Think it’s better to just announce to yourself, screw it, and run away for a while. Go to a place where you usually don’t go. Shake up your established structures. Order a 45 instead of a 9 mill. Cheers

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