Safe

Outside, there is danger.  Inside, there is boredom.  The claustrophobia of security inters us.  These neatly aligned houses--on pristine boulevards that woven together have become the great city--are tombstones.  Monoliths.  They sleep surrounded by fresh-clipped grass.  They wait in long, regular lines, soldiers, citadels.  Their white faces are tasting the morning sun.  Under the influence of the idea that safety is a kind of heaven, the people here are drugged by doubts and fears and the protection of the wall.

Fear of the Written Word

Years from now, all of this will seem inconsequential.  It probably will be.  It probably is now.  The urgency to write this memoir is the urgency to dig when one is buried alive, when one wakes up suffocating, inhaling the dirt of one's own shallow grave.  Driven by nerves, one digs.  Driven by nerves, one writes.  The matter of survival is much more important--between gasps and cries--than readership or one's next meal.  The uncertainty of tomorrow is easily eclipsed by the threat that exists today.  

(Even the bitter skeleton that was my aunt wore her seat belt religiously driving to and from her third round of chemo-therapy.)

But safety has never served me well.  Caution is the beginning of claustrophobia (imprisonment from without); and claustrophobia is the beginning of paralysis (imprisonment from within).  And weather wearing uniforms or orange vests, the protectors are a saintly lot who believe in nothing less that death.  Real dangers exist but they are metastasized by too much imagination, too little science, by my abandoned patience.  I am a hundred holes shot through the white flag.  Surrender, Dorthy.  (or--as God is my witness--Oz will Burn!)