Sleep, Sleep, you're better off dreaming...

My father used to say that one of the worst things in the world, gaining ground on famine and genocide, was wasted potential.

Robert DeNiro admonishes his son in much the same way in the film A Bronx Tale. I like to think, or hope, that my father was saying it long before that movie was released; a pearl of wisdom imparted to him by his father or even better, an adage he carved out for himself when on the cusp of adulthood.

At any rate, DeNiro’s character uses the word talent, instead of my father’s choice of potential, which though less grammatically viable as a noun, clearly delivers more clout when you say it.

Considering the source, my father wasn’t exactly the man to line up in front of for sagely advice.

He was certainly not one to lead by example, either.

Then again, he also used to say that you could learn something from anyone, regardless of their standing in the world, from a teacher all the way down to a bum on the street.

Someone, essentially, knows something you don’t. Ok. Given.

I often wonder about my potential.

There are days when I don’t believe I’m wasting anything, rather, I feel like I am being wasted.

There are days, all too few, when I can believe that all things stitched into reality’s fabric are possible. All avenues seem open, streets run in both directions, the lights are green, all the hidden avenues are revealed, and I become that guy who can navigate every back-road in existence.

There are stretches when I wonder if I’ve actually grown up at all, hopelessly stunted by some cataclysmic event playing a desperate game of catch-up, months, even years behind everyone else.

I’m a giant child making his way around a big city: engulfed in blinding bright lights, dog-paddling in a sea of noise, keeping pace in a herd of other people as we dart across the brick, mortar and metal sage-brush of a concrete jungle teaming with unforgiving, unyielding traffic. Most already know to look both ways, but I constantly learn the hard way, soaked to the bone as large rubber tires kick up rain water and slushy gray snow.

One thing I’ve come to understand is that this world isn’t in the business of giving you what you want. So recoil your hands, un-cup them, and forget about asking. Move away from the cosmic breadline, because there’s not enough charitable karma to go around in this life.

This just isn’t a time for dreaming, nor has it provided an adequate ground to cultivate them. Lately we’ve all been locked in survival mode, trying desperately to get by on what’s around in a landscape that values uniqueness and creative expression less and less.

In the process we’ve have become estranged from one another; set in competition for whatever is left that can propel us out of this shallow, two-dimensional entropy that threatens to assimilate us and into self-actualized autonomy, and the lives we desire…

... ...

The Steven King novella Langoliers deals with a small group of people on a cross-country flight waking on their airplane to the realization that they are the only ones present. After an emergency landing, they wander a deserted airport. Machinery doesn’t function. There is no electric power. Food tastes spoiled or has no taste to begin with. If I remember correctly, it’s impossible to make a flame; fuel wont burn in this time and space, in fact, a gun won’t even fire. Time it seems has literally frozen.

The passengers come to find out they have somehow become stuck several hours behind the rest of the world in a temporal drain that time has forgotten, living constantly, so to speak, in the past. To top it off, there are these menacing little monsters that look like sinewy flying bear-traps devouring everything in sight, which will include these people if they don’t find some way to get the hell out of there.

Panic ensues, and a few of them go a bit batty. Paranoid, they turn on others in the group. Some have dark secrets they aren’t very proud of—life choices the present situation forces them to confront that they’d sooner alter if only they could, and would like nothing more than to forget. Romantic feelings for others in the group crop up for some, love’s bliss something they had been denied for a long time. A few, or at least one discovers a latent gift in these dire circumstances, but it may be too late…

These people have come to where they are by no real fault of their own. Circumstances just, well, placed them there, sent their plane spiraling through some void while they dreamily slept, their minds occupied with visions of where they are headed, whom they will see and what they will do.

(Or maybe Superman was just in the middle of turning back his latest fuck-up…)

The survivors eventually make it back to the plane, (the fuel currently IN it somehow DOES burn--Can we say Deus ex Machina?) and must take it back through the rift to catch up with the rest of the living world. And they must all FALL back to sleep in order to do it.

One among them has to fly the plane however…

In the cockpit, he lowers the cabin pressure, helping his peers to fall asleep, to put their anxieties and fears aside and just let go, while sacrificing himself…

I, like the passengers in the novel, find myself stuck in a kind of existential layover. It’s difficult to spark anything here, an idea, or a worthwhile thought. Making an attempt is like striking a match on the moon. Nothing. Only faintly aware of what landed me here, all I know is that I have to make it out, but like them too, I don’t readily possess the knowledge or the resources to do so.

Am I wasting my potential?
Is the world wasting me?
Or am I just wasting time?
Will I end up a martyr, left behind?