It is late in the morning on an early spring day as Jimi Hendrix swirls through the air and I watch a child-size flag flutter in the breeze hanging from a telephone poll in an alley looking like the remnants of a defeated army, the last fragments of a fallen empire clinging tenaciously to the present. I wonder if the person who placed it there was conscious of the irony of it all. It is a symbol of a security that has been forever whipped away in the smoke and ash of that brutal September day back in 2001. Mine was one of the few faces watching the Twin Towers come crashing down on live TV that was not filled with the look of hideous surprise. Anger, yes, but not surprise. I was angry with the whole stinking world that day; angry with the perpetual cause and effect of ignorance born of overgrown children I had never bought into the myth of security, that the big boss in the oval office had everything under control. Security is a lie told to the self, an illusion that evaporates as quickly as a desert mirage when one gets too close, and I find it best not to indulge one's self too deeply in illusions, and eventually you have to come to the conclusion that most things taken for granted in this world are illusions of one sort or another. But then again, maybe I'm wrong. It does seem that billions get on in their daily lives by buying completely into illusions. Perhaps it is easier that way--easier in the short run, at least, but life is not a sprint, it is the iron-bitch of marathons, and those without endurance quickly fall by the wayside. The question is more one of fortitude than anything, but one must have a certain degree of humble sympathy at all times, for life beats even the best of us down at one time or another--what separates the runners from the fallen is how they whether those times of defeat, whether they have the strength to make through those times when every safety net is pulled out from beneath them. But it is in making it through that they see that those safety nets weren't really as safe as they thought.
But Jimi's guitar is screaming "Hear My Train A-Comin" now and a cool breeze is running over my face. That is all I need from the world--the security (if you can call it that) that there will be music to fill the air and cool breezes to rush across my face. That is enough. Everything else can go as it will, as it has been going since time immemorial. And so I go on, waving that flag for all its worth, and I'm not talking about the stars and stripes here--I am talking about the flag of survival in this world of steel and blood. You go on and wave that flag too, after all, you've earned the right, haven't you? Yes--wave that damn flag for all its worth, put your head back and bellow at the sky! Life may have kicked you to the ground, bashed your teeth in and left you for dead, but you gave it the big "fuck you!" and got back up. And that, my friend, is what counts when the tally sheet of life is added up, that when the road ran out, you screwed it on and punched the accelerator, cutting a broad swath through the wilderness where no foot had tread. Hot damn! Keep at it! Forward with flag in hand!