Autumn Ennui

I saw "Magic Bus" this weekend, the documentary about Ken Kesey and his Merry Band of Pranksters' trip across the country in their trippy acid bus. While I'm not so sure that I wished I had been on the bus, it made me wistful for the simplicity of it all...

Pretty much every hippie-themed documentary makes me feel this way: that somehow life was so damn simple back then when everyone just wanted to love each other and expand their consciousness. No one seemed to have any sort of outside demands...no one seemed to have a mortgage to pay or a job to show up for...everyone just seemed to be hanging out.

I know it's an illusion; those people had problems and probably bills and not everyone actually loved each other all the time (they even showed as much in the film's epilogue)...but it's still a fantasy I like to harbor...this idea that with the right choices, a person actually could go live freely on a farm, surrounded by friends, with nothing more to worry about than creating art and philosophizing. (How the food and electricity gets there, I don't know.)

I think it's the freedom I'm in love with...freedom from all responsibility. I suppose that's a product of being given too much responsibility at a young age, although that's really kind of a cop-out because I doubt that there is truly a "right" amount of responsibility to give a kid. You give too much, you force your kids to grow up too soon, you give too little and they never grow up...we, as parents, are screwed and our kids are screwed, too. 

But, I digress...so I saw that movie and then I went out to the Renaissance Festival (where my husband performs) yesterday and realized why that place is such a cult...it's people chasing this same fantasy of a simpler time, a freedom from the shackles of modernization...it's a bubble of zero responsibility...a tangible fantasy. (I'm sure there are artistic reasons people do it, too, but I can confidently say that not everyone out there has creative aspirations.)

This realization did not bring me any closer to wanting to embrace the Festival lifestyle, but it did make me ponder how to simplify my real life (no costumes required). Like millions of people, I suppose, I want to get off the hamster wheel...this constant cycle of things I have to do rather than things I want to do...it's figuring out how to be happier with less stuff and less scheduling. I want to tell you that it doesn't come down to money, but I think it does. I want to spend less, so I need less, so we can eventually not have our lives dictated by a need to acquire money. 

These are the things I am pondering today as I prepare to send my tiny babies off to THIRD GRADE tomorrow...it's just my anual back-to-school ennui, where I see the way my life is divided into neat little boxes that constantly need to be checked and I wonder how it all happened and whether it's possible to change...not depression, more of just a pondering of domesticated existence in these modern times.