Daydreaming of true freedom freedom freedom--the favorite unattainable Miss America dream of many, but freedom may not be freedom...but maybe true freedom ain’t the answer because there’s no such animal...few of us would actually want the kind of unlimited freedom we may dream of being some kind of utopia...no mortgages to pay, no car payments to worry about, no utility bills to pay...that would be nice, but even homeless people don’t really have total freedom...yeah, no jobs, true true, but most of them have to pander for money, and how depressing would that be?...I guess you get used to it...you see them holding a cardboard sign up asking for money...if you take a walk downtown, there they are--sitting on the sidewalk, maybe playing an instrument or singing if you got a knack for that, hoping someone will drop some spare change into a hat...you gotta eat handouts at the local pantry or church can and that can grow tiresome...have you ever had their food?...Thanksgiving dinner is normally pretty good, but the rest of the year...not so much...and who wants to eat with a bunch of losers like yourself?...just folks down on their luck, yeah, that’s it...down on your luck...once in a while, maybe you can splurge for a Whopper...you sleep on a park bench or in or on a cardboard box on the sidewalk...not exactly a Serta perfect sleeper...is that what freedom is all about?...sounds okay for a little while, but not for the long term...you can hang out in the library for a while--in the summer to catch some a/c, or in the winter to stay warm...at least in the bigger libraries, nobody hassles you there...so where is ultimate freedom?...win the lottery?...you could buy whatever...but for everything you gain, you lose something too...and when you lose something like poverty, you gain something too...like all these hangers-on hanging on...the relatives and ‘old friends’ come out of the woodwork...all trying to make you think their your BFF...and they are till the money’s gone...how about maybe in death...in the cemetery, people have got no problems...we think death frees us from the things that cause us pain or discomfort and it does...at least we think so...wouldn’t it be a bitch if you died and then you found out death had rules too...it just wasn’t one long rest in peace...fuck me...like wherever you go, you gotta follow some damn rules--life, death, and anything in between...you couldn’t just do what you want, or just do nothing...there’d be some dumb bastard who’s looking over your shoulder...maybe you get a yearly review-you get called into an office and a frown-faced superior says “sorry Hogan, you didn’t meet expectations”...what a bummer...that would take all the tranquility out of it...the truth is we don’t know what’s going to happen after we die...nobody does even though a lot of people think and say they do...personally, I’d like to be some kind of ghost or some kind of spirit and scare the hell out of people...I could get into that and most of them deserve it...maybe there is no such thing as freedom... maybe we need to be free of freedom...just run away into the abyss...you can’t ever have total freedom in life...maybe not even in death...who knows?
