I only wanted what everyone wanted.

Whilst living in (dear, beloved) Il Corral, during my metamorphosis, I read and read and read. Our walls were covered in bookshelves and masses of books from the 1954 Journal of Psychiatric Health to Herman Hesse to Coping with Abandonment. Christie and Stane's End of the World Bookshop that lined our beautiful hallway/kitchen/creatingspace/arthole  was a womb for me for so long. 

I'll be unable not to write more about Il Corral in the future, no doubt. But now I was thinking of something specific I have been thinking.

Oh yeah, fuck Kerouac. In the End of the World I read Kerouac (white man has adventures, shit talks women). I read Into the Wild (white man writes about other white man's stupid adventures). I read Jack London (white man has adventures, makes up a lot of bullshit about the North, refuses to put any female characters in his stories except one who gets 'hysteria' and dies). What else? 

These books somehow inherently angered a part of me that itches, and I've begun to explore why. 

I’m angry at the writers of the beat generation, white men who said “fuck it all” and set off to be free. Leaving behind families, of course. Wives who had to raise children all by themselves, whose lives and raw complex emotions may have made a better story. And all the copycats who came after them, falling away through the decades. Wealthy, able bodied young white man rejects privilege, has adventure. I see it all the time. I read it all the time. Am I bitter because I've loved them? Am I that hysterical girl who dies in the frozen gas station carpark outside of Arizona because I am not good enough for my sweet wandering prince?

Or is it that the magical white manchild is such a useful escapist mechanism, writing about him doesn't involve encumbering the listener with real world oppression that makes you retch hot vomit it is so unjust and the burning disparate desperation associated with women, people of colour, natives, who have to leave and never look back. Who can never return. 

I keep writing, and what itches me is this- Who gives a fuck about my story? 

God I’m such an asshole.
Heavenly father, my ego is flagging.

Truth is, in the cold light of 2.44am I feel like the beat poet runaway-and-be-free god-the-road-is-crazy let-me-tellyou-about-this-one-time horse has been beat to death for about fifty years now. That’s how I feel.
And I feel like my stories are just stories and I can't contain my disappointment.