Last night I had a conversation with a man from Texas. He warmed up when I told him I’m from Texas as well. We had a great, friendly conversation about travel, life, fate, etc. He asked me if I’d ever traveled through the Far East and I told him I’ve been to Taiwan, Japan, China, etc. He asked me where I liked best and I told him I liked visiting all those places, and they were good experiences, but I didn’t really feel a connection with the people. But I highly recommended hiking the Great Wall. I recommended that he see the temples of Angkor Wat while he still can (tourism is trampling and deteriorating the ruins). I’ve always wanted to go, but I’m afraid to visit Cambodia on my own. It’s easier and safer to travel to some places in this world alone if you’re a man.
He mentioned that China would be a total “mindfuck” and that word sparked. I laughed and said that the word “mindfuck” has come up a lot in conversations lately, and that words tend to synchronize in my life, whereas I’ll be writing or thinking of certain words or themes, and they’ll pop up randomly in conversation with people, except they’ll come out of the other person’s mouth. He asked if I thought the matrix was real and I laughed and said that 2 days ago, I finally decided to rewatch the Matrix because I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. I do think it’s real, or something like it. I don’t think that this world as we know it is all there is.
“You’re from Texas, so you’re probably the best person I could talk to you about this,” I said to him, and he leaned in, his eyes widening in attentiveness.
“You know those tiny, dusty little Texas towns, where there’s just one main street drag and there’s nothing to do. You grow up there, you work there, you die there. You’re bored out of your fucking mind because you hang out at the same places with the same people. You marry someone you grew up with, you’re all fucking the same people. Hell, you’re even cheating on each other with the same people.”
He was laughing so hard while I talked about these Texas shitholes; he was well familiar with them. “And the best escape they have is maybe driving a few hours to some shitty little town in Mexico, and that’s as big as their world is,” he said.
“In fact, randomly, I watched this movie about that town. It was some old black and white movie with Tim Bottoms, and Jeff Bridges…The Last Picture Show.”
“I know that one,” he said. “With Cybil Shepherd. That’s exactly the town!”
“Exactly! People in this shitty little Texas town don’t think about New York, or LA, or Paris,” I said. “All they know is that this tiny shithole is the extent of their entire world, their entire universe. That all their choices must come from this tiny place of limited options. They’re born into it, and eventually, it sucks them dry of their hopes and dreams and it kills them from the inside out. But what if that shitty little town is Earth? What if we’re sitting here thinking, this is it. This is the best life has to offer? At best, we dream of maybe moving to Paris, or taking a vacation in Australia. Meet someone, settle down, live out our lives. What if Paris is our little town in Mexico, and Fiji is the bar or pool house on Main St? What if you think you have to pick a partner from this group of people you grew up with, but meanwhile, someone who is a better match for you is out there, beyond the town limits of your tiny hometown, but you’ve never imagined it because your imagination is trapped by the confines of this place? And meanwhile, there’s an entire universe out there, an entire world of options out there, but we don’t realize because we grew up thinking all we know is all there is?”
“This place is too small for me,” I told him. “I love Earth, but this place is too small for me. What if Earth is just one little shitty town in the armpit of Texas, where people live and die smaller lives than they are capable of having, and meanwhile, there’s an entire living, breathing universe out there that we could live and touch if we could just commit to believing there’s more than just this town, this planet, this plane of existence?”
“I would love to go to Saturn,” he said.
“I would love to get out of here,” I said. “Anywhere. Just to know this isn’t all there is.”