Living Free

I came back to San Diego late last night. A very long flight from Europe.

I’m back here because I have an existential quandary… a life question to answer… a fork in the road, if you will, and the only way to pass it is accept that there is no fork and indeed there is no road, and that any idea of any path at all is just an illusion.

An Existential Question

I came back to consult with The Porn Guru. He works from the Kearny Mesa section of San Diego. He is Existentialist, Ph.D., guide to rich men and Dostoevskian Idiots like me. He introduced me to the whole Existential philosophy, and indirectly to postmodernism too. I trust him more than anyone.

Of course, The Porn Guru will not give me an answer to my question. He does not give answers. He will only help me realize things that I have not thought of. And he is very good at that.

Today– my first full day back– has been a beautiful day. Bright and sunny, the slightly salty smell of the warm sea air providing the life breath to lungs and to mind… and also to loins, of course.

I sat at the front patio of Starbucks at B Street and 28th, in Golden Hill, for a couple of hours. Reading Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. It is a spectacular book. Sure, it stretches plausibility sometimes, and Rand is a much better dramatist than a novelist. The best way to regard it is as a thought-provoking mini-series in book form. And its most potent effect is what it inspires you to think about, not the plot or the story it feeds to you directly.

I should have read it when I was 17. Well… I’m 34 now, and that’s double 17, and anyway there is never a reason not to seek out inspiration. Perhaps when you stop seeking inspiration, you die, one way or another.

Problem is that the book is so fucking long. My copy has 1,069 pages of text. The plot is revealed on page 677. Page 677!!! Luckily there is plenty of juice to keep you interested- and thinking- along the way. Rand writes about sex… lots and lots about sex… and about power and sex… and about submission and sex… and about achievement and sex… and all that sex-writing is quite thought-provoking in itself.

I realized, sitting there, that I needed to get up and take a walk. Walk and think. I had been reading and thinking and reflecting there on the Starbucks patio far too long. So I decided to walk downtown.

As I’m walking down B Street, the Symphony Towers overhead, I stride past a 30-something black dude walking with a toothless, worn, wrinkled woman who is only slightly older.

He looks at me. “How you livin’, man?”

Huh? What’s that? It takes me a minute to escape from my thoughts about Dagny Taggart and how the three leading men of the book want to fuck her… neigh, to own her, sexually and in every other way… because of her ability. “Wha..?” I mumble to the dude.

“You look like you livin’ large”, he states, assuredly.

How could he know? Is that why is he commenting? Does he see it in my gait? In my face?

A moment passes. And then I respond, “No, man… I’m living… free.”

“Living free, huh? Dude here is living free.”

I have the novel in my right hand. I had walked rapidly passed him and the woman during the exchange. I turn, point my hand with the fat book in it at him. “That’s right. And living free is better than living large. Living free is better than anything.”

Without missing a beat, the black man replies, “You got that right, man.”

I turn back around and walk on.